"But humor more than most, because humor relies on surprise - the ridiculous, the unexpected, the absurd.

(Satire achieves surprise by saying, out loud, the thoughts you didn't dare think. Fake satires repeat thoughts you were already thinking.)"

Actually I've always felt a large part of humour is depicting saying what everyone thinks but nobody says. How many comedians make jokes about spouses, traffic, their own minority, how often are those jokes things people in the audience don't already think about?

"A building labeled "science", and a standard Godzilla-ish monster labeled "Bush" stomping on the "science" building. Now there are people who will laugh at this - hur hur, scored a point off Bush, hur hur - but this political cartoon didn't take much effort to imagine."

It gave me a little chuckle, but not just because I dislike Bush (if a similar, but valid, joke was made about a politician I support my reaction would be much less, but still humorous). It's funny because none of the premise are things that are really in debate, none denies that Bush and scientists, or scientific institutions, rarely agree. Even the part about Bush being a big dumb brute isn't in huge contention (I rarely hear Bush supporters claim intellect as an attribute). The humour is in the fact that something so political, nuanced, and abstract, is put as bluntly as possible, that Bush is a big stupid brute stomping on science.

Gates with a pie in the face is nothing more than schadenfreude, something that might make me smirk if I was particularly displeased with Microsoft that day but not something that can really be classified as humour.

The tentacled monster I have to admit I didn't really find funny, I can see it has more levels than the stomping monster but it lost the brazenness of the stomping Bush monster.

In fact for an improvement on the Bushzila I'd suggest that instead having a Bush King Kong demolishing the building by using a giant cross as a pickax. All the bluntness of the original but also including his Religious motivations (could add some damage to the cross from it being used as a pickax if you want to suggest he's abusing religion).