PROVIDENCE -- "As Yogi Berra may have once observed, humor can be a funny thing. What tickles one person's funny bone can boil another's blood." So begins an eight-page decision issued yesterday by the state Supreme Court, in which the justices unanimously agreed that a cartoon drawn by Don Bousquet did not libel a local pest-control company.
The court noted that Bousquet's cartoon shows "two goofy-looking" guys; "one of them wears a shirt with the words 'Budget Pest Control' on it. This worker is grinning maniacally while holding a gas can in his hand. Behind him a house is all ablaze. His fellow co-worker . . . is assuring a distraught woman standing in front of them as follows: 'Easy, now, ma'am. This is Billy Bob's first day on the job and them carpenter ants can be real stubborn.' "
The cartoon ran in the comics pages of the Providence Sunday Journal in August 1999. George Cardoza, president of Budget Termite & Pest Control, was not amused. Bousquet had drawn commercials for Cardoza's competitor, New England Pest Control (home of the Big Blue Bug), and Cardoza believed that Bousquet was taking a swipe at his Warwick firm. So he sued Bousquet, without naming The Journal as party to the suit.
Superior Court Judge Nettie Vogel summarily dismissed Cardoza's suit, ruling that the cartoon was not "capable of bearing a defamatory ruling."
Cardoza appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which upheld Vogel. In a decision written by the full court, the justices said, "The exaggerated comic tone of the cartoon and its published location on the Sunday comics page suggested that the author designed the cartoon to be humorous rather than as . . . a factual statement" about Cardoza's firm.
The generic word Budget "furthered the humor of the cartoon by implying that this 'budget' outfit was so cut-rate and shoddy that it burned down the house of a customer to rid the premises of 'stubborn' carpenter ants -- a proposition so absurd and outlandish that no reasonable reader could construe it as a truthful factual assertion."
Bousquet testified that he had never heard of Cardoza or his firm when he drew the cartoon. He said yesterday that the cartoon was part of a series of "Budget" jokes, which has included Budget Funeral and Budget Cat Scan. The funeral cartoon showed a butt-smoking guy driving a Model-T truck with a rusted bed bearing a casket; the Budget Cat Scan showed a house cat sitting atop a man's head in a hospital bed.
"What kind of justice is this?" Bousquet said yesterday. "Where is the justice when somebody can sue for something as frivolous as this and you have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars defending yourself." Bousquet, who hired the law firm of former Atty. Gen. James O'Neil, said he may seek legal fees from Cardoza.
Cardoza's lawyer, John Longo, told the Associated Press that the cartoon really bothered Cardoza; Cardoza was familiar with Bousquet's work for New England Pest Control, and he truly believed that the cartoon was deliberately denigrating his workers by showing them as "incompetent pyromaniacs."
