The Pimpsons (toon)

First some background...

They're recognisable characters from the popular US show The Simpsons, but on "The Pimpsons" Facebook page they have different names and personalities. Here they are the recognisable characters from Kosovar politics.

Artist Fisnik Ismaili was unhappy seeing the US ambassador to Kosovo Christopher Dell take an active role in his country's political scene. Watching Dell at a televised news conference with some of Kosovo's top political leaders Ismaili realised he looked familiar: Dell looked like "Comic Book Guy" from The Simpsons. That was the inspiration for "The Pimpsons." Based on the idea that figures like Dell were the 'pimps' of Kosovo, Ismaili created an online cartoon that cast political figures into Simpsons characters."What I'm doing is not funny," Ismaili told The Stream. "It's portraying a reality that has become a joke in this country."

The cartoon takes place in single image "episodes" on Facebook, on a page that already boasts more than 15,000 likes. But Fisnik says that's not the entire picture of his audience. He told us: "Many people do not dare to 'like' it because they do not want their names appearing there. The best way to tell you how many viewers this has had – I just checked it now - it had 5.5 million post views in three months."

Some online wondered if international involvement in Kosovo's internal politics isn't a price the country has had to pay for being so young. Kosovo only declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, and it did so unilaterally, over the objections of many other nations. On Twitter, user @AHFitzpatrick wrote in: "You can't unilaterally declare independence and expect to get away with it clean." Speaking in response to this issue Ismaili said, "There's no free lunch as they say, it's all about compromises. But it's also a question of how much of those compromises do we have to make?" Drawing a comparison to South Sudan's recent independence he said, "Sudan itself recognised South Sudan right away whereas Serbia refuses to do so ."

http://www.stream.aljazeera.com/story/the-pimpsonskosovo

Why didn't someone in the US come up with this idea? There's a whole hell of a lot more pimps in the US government than just about anywhere else. Hell, why didn't Matt Groening come up with this idea? It would be a hell of a lot funnier than the Simpsons are, and it might just wake up a few people at the same time!
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