Chuckling over the New Yorker

I would be happier with the idea that the New Yorker’s cover was satirical, as editor David Remnick claimed, if it was funny. Isn’t satire supposed to be funny? (Jeffrey Goldberg alerts me to the fact that an editorial writer at the New York Sun chuckled over it for several minutes. I didn’t chuckle even for a moment. It wasn't that I was offended. I was just puzzled. What am I supposed to make of this, I wondered?)

Imagine the cartoon were not on the cover of the New Yorker. Most people, I think, would then read it not as reducing a certain idiotic view of Barack Obama and his wife to a comical absurdity, but as expressing that idiotic view with caricatural emphasis. Would it have been satirical (in the sense David Remnick means) on the cover of National Review? At best, without a caption or headline to send the image up, its meaning is unclear: it is a joke without a punchline, and just doesn’t work (except, of course, as a way to get people talking about the magazine).

Obama rightly made light of it. He called it (I'm paraphrasing) an attempt at satire that failed. That is exactly what it was.

Comments

Who says satire has to be funny? Was Animal Farm funny? Gulliver's Travels? Art Spiegelman was on NPR yesterday making some good points defending the cartoonist. Worth a listen.

The cover is, if nothing else, provocative and gets a conversation going. Also how can you decontextualize the art from the media it appears in? Why is this a litmus test? It's like saying if you swapped a Playboy cover onto Time magazine, people would be offended.

Posted by cas | July 16, 2008 9:44 AM

Cas: Now you've really got me wondering about my sense of humor. Yes, for heaven's sake, Animal Farm and Gulliver's Travels are funny. Surely the least you require of satire is that it elicits a wry smile. The joke in this case is lame, and its object is unclear--hence the controversy. Is the cartoonist trying to ridicule the Obamas or their critics? Hard to say, just looking at the cartoon. No doubt the hidden caption is, "This is the New Yorker, so we would never dream of ridiculing the Obamas". But I think the fact that you need this "context" subtracts too much from the cover's effectiveness.

Posted by Clive Crook | July 16, 2008 10:19 AM

It was mildly funny, in a New Yorker kind of way, because it satirizes the surprisingly persistent fringe view of Obama. The National Review equivalent would be to caricature McCain as a senile warmonger trying to achieve victory in Vietnam while having an orgy with blond lobbyists.

When your elderly next-door neighbor sincerely insists to you that Obama is a secret Muslim intent on subverting the US government on behalf of terrorists, you might find the cover funny. Watching the TV interviews with West Virginia voters might do the trick too.

The Economist political blog had a telling post about Obama's apparent lack of humor:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2008/07/nothing_funny_about_senator_ob.cfm

Posted by Ken B | July 16, 2008 10:59 AM

The best satire has a kernel of truth. This cartoon is based on falsehoods, and that is why it is not funny, and why it is categorically different from other political cartoons run by and proposed for the New Yorker. There is truth in it, but it's second order truth. It's beyond the grasp of the people who need its message most. Because of this the cartoon is effectively an instrument in the mis- and disinfomation campaign of the political machine of Obama's adversaries.

It's like shouting "bomb!" after miscreants spread false rumors of a bomb threat. We can call it "satire", we can call it a first amendment issue, and all sorts of other things. But do we really want to go there?

Posted by JJ | July 16, 2008 11:19 AM

Let me clarify: yes both books contain funny ideas, scenes, etc., but the crux of each was that there was a serious issue being satirized underneath that the intended audience would recognize. You don't need to laugh at either or even find them especially amusing to be effective works. If you did find it funny, it would no doubt enhance the work, but its intent seems clear nonetheless.

My point is that I don't think it automatically disqualifies the piece from being effective just because you don't find it funny. Humor is one of the most subjective things we experience.

As to your second point about the opacity of the art, again I don't see how you can divorce it from the context in which it appears. The New Yorker is as strong a cultural signifier (for some, namely its audience) as the images depicted in the cartoon. Is this a crutch? I suppose, but taken all together as one cohesive thing, all I can say is it works for me.

I'm honestly surprised that the picture would confound you. I look at it and the message seems clear: if all the rumors about Obama were true, this is the patently absurd image you'd be left with. I suppose your retort is: if it wasn't on The New Yorker would you still respond this way? Of course not, I'd assume it was just the work of some ignorant paranoid rascist xenophobe. But isn't that exactly what the artist is going for?

Anyways, your position obviously still stands as our POVs boil down to an argument about semiotics.

Posted by cas | July 16, 2008 11:36 AM

Ken B said:
"When your elderly next-door neighbor sincerely insists to you that Obama is a secret Muslim intent on subverting the US government on behalf of terrorists, you might find the cover funny. Watching the TV interviews with West Virginia voters might do the trick too."

That's an interesting take, but I have to say, that's precisely why I don't think the cover is funny at all. Here's the problem: Those West Virginia voters, and that elderly neighbor and who knows how many more millions of people that buy into these absurd lies? Their votes count too. So the election may well turn on people that think "well, that black guy, I hear he's a secret Muslim."
That New Yorker cover won't influence anyone either way, but I agree with Clive Crook. Barry Blitt missed the mark.

Posted by Chuck S. | July 16, 2008 11:59 AM

Satire doesn't have to be funny. Humor is beside the point and is really a separate characteristic. Satire usually works by exaggeration, putting foibles or tendencies in relief. Transforming Soviet party planners into pigs on a farm, for example. Swift's coterie of the tall, small, the horse-like, and so on, is a coterie of the cartoonish. Satire can be funny, sure, but that's not even the same thing as having a sense of humor, where 'humor' can be defined as a creative sense of the world. In that sense satire uses these powers of transformation to skewer those in powerful positions -- skewering the weak is another thing isn't quite satire. But it can be deadly serious, if bleakly 'funny', as in Swift's famous "A Modest Proposal": solve the Irish problem and hunger in one fell blow by having people eat the babies.

Satire is a form of irony. Irony entails two meanings to a statement, thus two audiences. One audience only gets the surface meaning, the second is 'hip' to the underlying message. The trouble with satire is how fine a line it is between talking in some smug bastard's voice to send it up for a broad audience and not sending it up quite right and having too many confuse the satire with the surface statement. The movie Starship Troopers is a very good example of this -- it's drawn so close to the line... is it a glorification of fascist warmongering states and sensibilities, or a send up? There are probably groups of fans on either side.

That's the trouble. When the surface message -- 'the Obamas are terrorists!' -- is so convincing that most of the audience doesn't proceed to look for the second ironic meaning, perhaps something has gone wrong. It doesn't quite pay to try to convince the offended: they haven't bought the tickets at the box office and the clean, brutally quick nature of satire has not been effective.

Context is clearly important. The statement is different if printed on the cover of the National Review or posted by Free Republic, much less Stormfront or Little Green Footballs. That it is the cover of the New Yorker is vital, as that's entirely the point of the satire, its 'second message': the New Yorker wouldn't say that!!... as cas says.

The problem, I think, is that it speaks too entirely in the voice of those intending to be skewered. And that the 'secret muslim' smears are too dire for a bank of people to be dealt with flippantly.

I find the cover, myself, to be unsuccessful as satire and showing a bad sense of timing and place. They tried to finesse a deep-seated political issue the same way they finesse their cartoons about, say, a yuppie couple discussing cheeses in a bistro. It's not quite the same thing.

Posted by elw | July 16, 2008 12:19 PM

Bad satire...on the cover of The New Yorker. So what's next, ya crazy young pranksters? The dog with the revolver to its head? (Buy this magazine or else...)

Posted by miamian | July 16, 2008 12:37 PM

Lighten up, dudes and dudettes. It's only a cartoon.

Posted by observer | July 16, 2008 2:04 PM

Lighten up, dudes and dudettes. It's only a cartoon.

Posted by observer | July 16, 2008 2:04 PM

"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."

Swift, The Battle of the Books, preface (1704)

Swift and Orwell's satire succeeded because almost everyone could see that it was metaphorical. The New Yorker cover fails because the metaphor it tries to convey is unclear. If the author/artist has to tell everyone "it's satire, folks!" then he or she has failed.

Posted by marklemagne | July 16, 2008 3:50 PM

Poor Excuses
The excuses given by David Remnick and his staff for the July 21 New Yorker cover are as appalling as the cover itself. The suggestion that those of us distressed by this cover somehow don’t “get it” is insulting. We get, quite clearly, that they ignored context and subtext and with an odd insular arrogance have provided encouragement and support for those undermining the candidacy of Senator Obama.
I have on my computer, most of the New Yorker’s covers. In spite of their claim that this cover is in a tradition of political satire, there is no cover illustration of John Kennedy kneeling to kiss the Pope’s ring nor is there Martin Luther King with Mao’s Little Red Book. They have made a serious mistake and admitting it would be far more fitting a great magazine than their excuses.

Posted by Kent Smith | July 16, 2008 4:18 PM

JESSE JACKSON made them do it!

But seriously folks, there seem to be some Democrats who, deep down inside, just can't accept the fact that the Senator from New York didn't get the nomination.

The New Yorker editors seem to be the same snide elitists they have always been. Maybe they should pull their heads out from between their "ivory towers" once in a while and look around at the real world.

Posted by seymour | July 16, 2008 6:33 PM

I find it wonderfully aimed at the flapping jaws of all the onliners who are so busy spreading lies because they can't defeat a man by mature, intelligent argument and disagreement. In fact, I think they should have put a cartoon on the other side: a man in a white sheet sitting in front of a computer with other white robed cowards making things up for him to send out on the net aimed at Senator Obama, none of which will be signed with a name. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.

Keep it up New Yorker. There is a reason I am a proud subscriber.

Posted by Doug Eddy | July 16, 2008 10:58 PM

I find it wonderfully aimed at the flapping jaws of all the onliners who are so busy spreading lies because they can't defeat a man by mature, intelligent argument and disagreement. In fact, I think they should have put a cartoon on the other side: a man in a white sheet sitting in front of a computer with other white robed cowards making things up for him to send out on the net aimed at Senator Obama, none of which will be signed with a name. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.

Keep it up New Yorker. There is a reason I am a proud subscriber.

Posted by Doug Eddy | July 16, 2008 11:00 PM

Now, if they had a cover showing a Republican with a paintbrush painting that cover, that would have been satire. It would have had the object of the satire in the picture, would have been clear, and would have had that necessary element of truthfulness that makes satire bite.

instead, it was a depiction of the racist caricature of Obama - that's all it was. The cartoonist took the caricature from the emails and from FOX's racist speculations and combined them all into one package - that's not satire. That's not funny and it has the opposite effect of the intended one.

Posted by Kija | July 21, 2008 4:52 PM

Working in Cambridge, MA, my first reaction to the cover, having missed the pre-release press surrounding it was laughter not at the humorous image, (though the stylistic touch similar to the J.J. Evans paintings displayed during the theme music to the later seasons of Good Times gave me a moment of happy reminiscence), but instead at the certainty of outrage on the part of the Obama crowd who seem to strive for their favoured candidate's victimhood, as if coming to the aid of a man who has never personally sought the underdog label makes them more caring and compassionate people.

Despite all the talk about whether the cover is racism or satire, I see it more clearly as a beautiful marketing tool for the New Yorker Magazine, which I've seen diminish in sales around the liberal capital of Cambridge in recent years. Case in point, last week's issue sold out of the Harvard Square newsstands by tuesday (here I am thankful for subscription service) while this weeks issue, with its comprehensive story on medicinal marijuana, is an afterthought among the far left crowd. Whatever the implications of such a cover among the opinionated, the sales figures will almost certainly register the cover a successful venture.

Posted by Cahteah | July 22, 2008 9:12 PM

Rick Hertzberg:

"I don’t see how it can be denied that the satiric exercise must be considered, shall we say, somewhat less than completely successful."

Posted by Oliver | July 23, 2008 4:24 AM