Last week, in the aftermath of The New Yorker’s now notorious cover cartoon depicting Barack Obama in Muslim dress and his wife in ’60s-style black militant gear — the two sharing an affinity for Osama bin Laden and a penchant for burning the American flag in the Oval Office — the country was abuzz with a question that is generally the preserve of doctoral candidates in English literature and cartoon-enraged Islamic militants: Are some subjects off limits to satire? Some people went further and asked if the magazine’s cover qualified as satire at all. That is more to the point.
Yes, Lee, apparently some subjects are off limits to satire when they think (incorrectly) that the target is a beloved icon of the left. Siegel then holds up a microscope to overanalyze satire:
When The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, defended the incendiary illustration in a statement invoking the spirit of satire as something “meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to the absurd,” he was, it could be argued, mischaracterizing his subject. For satire has always taken as its target conventions, sentiments and injustices that are universally recognizable and complacently accepted, and not at all hidden phenomena that have to be roughly revealed. The reporter is the one who exposes social rottenness operating in secret. The satirist deposes it once it has become a visible and established part of life.
I don't know about you, but I already feel like popping a couple of aspirins after reading Siegel's lecture on the meaning of satire. Therefore, let us now skip over Siegel's dead serious conjuring up of Juvenal, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Honoré Daumier, and George Grosz (I kid you not) to explain in way too much detail why he thinks the New Yorker cover was not really funny. Not only does Siegel think the cover wasn't funny but he launches a serious attack on what really draws his ire:
If you accept this definition of satire, then the reason The New Yorker’s cover seems to have fallen short is precisely that it brought out into open, respectable space an idea of the Obamas that is still, happily, considered contemptible. The portrait of them as secret Muslims, in cahoots with terrorists and harboring virulent anti-American sentiments, exists for the most part either on the lunatic fringe or in what some might call the lunatic establishment: radically partisan entities like Fox News...
...The New Yorker represented the right-wing caricature of the Obamas while making the fatal error of not also caricaturing the right wing...
...But if that very same New Yorker cover had been drawn in a balloon over the head of a deranged citizen — or a ruthless political operative — it would have appeared as plausible only in the mind of that person. The image would have come across as absurd and unjust — a version of reality exaggerated to the point of madness...
Yeah, the New Yorker was at fault for being too subtle. They should have have cluttered up the cover by drawing a Snidley Whiplash moustache on some evil right-winger (Rush Limbaugh?) along with a thought balloon of the original cartoon.
Another person offended by that Obama cover was the oh so PC Gina Barreca, a "professor of English and feminist theory." The very title of Ms Barreca's article in today's Hartford Courant tells you where she is coming from: "A Childish Stunt That Only Shocks And Offends." This could also be retitled as "We Are Not Amused." Barreca starts right out by letting us know where her feminist mind is at:
The New Yorker cover depicting Barack Obama as a Muslim and his wife as some kind of armed black separatist was about as sophisticated a piece of satire as a penis drawn on a desk.
As anybody who's been teaching for more than 15 minutes knows, in pretty much every classroom you enter there will be a picture of a penis drawn or carved onto a surface. This is not, I would argue, a fabulously insouciant form of deconstructive satire emerging from the anxieties surrounding gender/sex issues in contemporary culture. This is not even a jejeune exploration of a particular individual's nascent and charming outpouring of self-realization. It is, on every level, one-dimensional.
The strange thing here is that feminist Ms Barreca's phallic obsession accompanied by her strained two dollar words is actually funnier than the New Yorker cover of the Obamas. And now for her phallic op-ed punchline:
It's a dick on a desk.
Obsession, thy name is Gina Barreca. She then seems to drop her phallic fantasies. I say "seems" because her allusions to sticks is suspect:
Neanderthals drawing stick figures on cave walls had layered, informed, soul-searching and complex artistic experiences. It would be tough to make that argument about the cover of The New Yorker and those who conceived of the concept behind it. If one of the Neanderthals had drawn a mastodon stomping one of the stick figures — which, for all I know exists on a cave wall in France somewhere — then that would have been satire, or at least you could have seen it as an attempt at satire. But when I looked at The New Yorker cover, I didn't see anything nearly as droll as a stick figure being stomped on by a mastodon.
Although these leftist commentators are inadvertently funny, they reveal themselves as being essentially humorless souls. With all this agonizing over the meaning of the New Yorker cover, it makes one yearn for the day when people (and politicians) could just sit back and enjoy the humor without microanalyzing its meaning. Such a person was Ronald Reagan. Check out this video of Don Rickles roasting Ronald Reagan around 1970. Not a bit of hesitating self-analysis of the jokes by Reagan. Instead he was thoroughly enjoying himself. Real men know how to laugh at themselves...and you can see Ronald Reagan was having a great laugh.
