Categorical Aperitif

Sir:

I've had difficulty before with finding humor in your cartoons, which often seem more like dispatches from a perpetually angry, delusional id rather than creations of considered wit and insight; however, this one really has me baffled:

For the life of me, I just can't figure out what's supposed to be funny here. Is it the depiction of the U.S. Senate as the imperial Roman Senate, complete with bloated, clueless imperial senators? No, that can't be: a war supporter like you would surely not wish to acknowledge complaints that under Bush the U.S. has increasingly become, like ancient Rome, an arrogant, voracious, anti-democratic imperial power that tromps brutally around the world asserting its right to do as it pleases with hypocritical disregard for the very rights it claims to champion; however, your cartoon does nothing so much as conjure up this unfortunate analogy. But there's nothing funny about that—unless perhaps you mean in Marx's sense of history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. But I'm sure that the very mention of Karl Marx makes your buttocks clench in dismay, so it seems unlikely that you meant this to be the source of humor.

Is it the counterintuitive response to the herald's upbeat "news from the front"? As I acknowledged to your colleague Glenn McCoy a little while ago, reversal is a common source of humor; is the fact that the people in your cartoon treat the message as bad when it seems to be good supposed to be funny? This might actually work—if only you hadn't gone and actually had the glowing dispatch from the front being signed by "Gen. Petraeus." I guess you were worried that otherwise, nobody would get the lame shot at MoveOn.org—but frankly, I think that even that would be funnier if you'd left out the general's name. (See, there's this thing called allusion, and...well, I think Aristotle says somewhere that the best art leaves a lot up to the audience, so the audience has to share in the cognitive labor of making meaning—for from this shared labor comes much of the joy of art. Take a few moments now to ponder the implications of this for cartoonists who obsessively stick labels on everything they draw lest someone might have to think a little to figure out what it stands for, God forbid.) By explicitly including the general's name, you see, you cannot help but create the impression that (a) this glowing dispatch is supposed to represent the Petraeus report and (b) you think that such a glowing report from a thoroughly politicized general on a war effort that he himself has been superintending should be taken as serious, objective "news" rather than as establishment propaganda. Mind you, coming from an adult, your kind of simplistic, childlike faith in Official Spokesmen and Great Leaders is touching, indeed, almost funny—just not in a ha-ha sort of way.

If it's not the unfortunate Rome analogy, and if it's not the "taking good news as bad news" reversal—is it the depiction of Ted Kennedy in a toga, lying there like a beached senatorial whale? Is that where you put the humor? Is that all you've got? Help me out here.

Labels: editorial cartoons

// posted by nash @ 9:25 AM