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LAST GASP
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Furor over New Yorker
cartoon was absurd
of TheColumnists.com
The mighty flap
over the recent New Yorker cover cartoon depicting Barack
and Michelle Obama clothed in wacko right-wing clichés
is a good indication of the state of the outrage meter in America,
where millions of people can’t wait to be offended daily
at just about anything. The simplest event can trip their hair-trigger
synapses.
Anyone who has ever read The New Yorker expects just this
sort of satirical comment weekly in its pages and on its cover--indeed,
it’s why most of us read the magazine. The regular reader
perhaps chuckled and turned the page.
Meanwhile, the professionally offended
contingent went bananas--and then the media, always eager to
pile on and erect a mountain out of any convenient molehill,
leaped into action to build the alleged “controversy”
even if one didn’t really exist. It’s this week’s
example of the media at its most desperate, disingenuous, or
just dopiest. Chalk it all up to a slow news dog-day.
To justify the controversy, the usual outrage leaders and watchdog
groups were called upon to comment, and they responded, as expected,
in their usual aghast fashion. Politicians hurriedly called press
conferences to express their shock and horror at the cover. That
ever-quotable guy in the street (or more often, the diner) was
asked for his sober response. Ninety percent of them likely said,
“What’s The New Yorker?,” until a conscientious
reporter found the one in a hundred anxious to vent his anger
on camera.
To lend further proof that the electorate was up in arms over
the cartoon, surveys were quoted showing that a percentage of
the public took the cartoon at face value--as if it were a photograph--and
were deeply offended.
Many, ostensibly, were so upset they could barely function. Others
repainted their picket signs and stormed the magazine. To further
fan the controversy, the media quoted its favorite statistic--that
12 percent of the public believes that Obama is a Muslim and
used a Koran to be sworn in as senator. This is the same 12 percent
of Americans that believe that JFK was killed by a conspiracy
led by Lyndon Johnson, that the moon landing was a hoax, that
several people have been kidnapped by Martian invaders and that
Mickey Mouse is a real person.
Satire has never played well in America. To quote George S. Kaufman,
one of the theater’s great satirical playwrights, “Satire
is what closes on Saturday night.” In America, it’s
lucky to open on Tuesday night.
Most Americans have a tin ear for irony.
Some never get the joke, just as they didn’t get the recent
New Yorker cover--or, it’s safe to say, most of the
cartoons inside. Americans love jokes and slapstick farce but
anything that requires ironic context tends to elude them. There
are no mainstream satirical magazines in America except MAD
and The New Yorker, and precious little left even in its
once droll pages, where a famous profile of Henry Luce was once
written entirely in (then) contorted, purple Time-magazine
lingo.
Of those Americans that got the humor on the recent cover, many
huffed, “It’s not funny,” or “It’s in
terrible taste!” The fact is, it was medium funny but nothing
that radical that hasn’t been done by now in scores of political
cartoons.
The fact that it’s on the cover of a major magazine disturbed
the professional bluenoses who wake up every morning just waiting
to be dismayed and disturbed.
“Most readers will see the cover as tasteless and offensive,” said a member of Obama’s campaign team.
Most readers will not give it a second
thought--or wouldn’t have until the Easily Offended bloc
went into full apoplectic overdrive.
Ever since Tina Brown took over, “updated” and almost
ruined The New Yorker, before she was replaced in the
nick of time, the covers have labored to make political and social
points in a desperate effort to be “relevant,” to make
a splash, or just to get people riled up--exactly as the Barry
Blitt cover has done nicely.
Earlier covers by Art Spiegelman--like
one depicting a Hassidic Jew kissing an Arab--caused a similar
calculated ruckus. Controversy has replaced humor in America,
even at The New Yorker, at one time the shining model
of subtle humor, taste and satirical understatement.
Them days are long gone, even though the magazine still has a
thinning veneer of civility and I still read it avidly for the
worthwhile pieces, good writing and reportage and comic art--even
if it publishes one--and only one! --certifiable humor piece
a week. This is the magazine that made its name in deadly satire
and free-wheeling wit by the likes of Thurber, Benchley, Parker,
White, Frank Sullivan and scores of other dazzling writers.
The magazine now seems to wallow more in shock for circulation’s
sake - casual nude or graphic photos (and covers), the generous
(look-ma-no-more-constraints!) use of raw language in its fiction,
and - maybe most offensive to regular readers--gaudy self-promotion,
like the back page cartoon caption contest, that would have caused
self-effacing editors like Harold Ross, E.B. White and William
Shawn to dive under the nearest desk.
If the magazine was a wild and crazy place to work, as depicted
by Thurber and others who worked there forever, it was never
reflected in its serene pages. The magazine seemed to have been
edited on some distant island of utter calm and civility.
Many of its modernizing changes were met by screams from the
staff and frowns by longtime dedicated New Yorker readers.
The New Yorker always played by its own rules, which made
it unique and above the journalistic fray, like putting bylines
at the end of articles, disdaining a table of contents (annoying
but it forced you to leaf through the magazine), and only mentioning
its hallowed contributors when they died, celebrated by discreet
obits on the last page.
Tina Brown bulldozed many of the nuanced elements that had made
the magazine one of a kind, partly to call attention to herself.
She rudely, crudely, introduced noisy color photos onto pages
formerly graced only by exacting pen and ink drawings, and seemed
obsessed with making the magazine au courant at all costs.
Hey, jazzing up worked for her at Vanity Fair, so why
not The New Yorker?
Brown, a Brit with no built-in loyalty to the magazine’s
famous past, didn’t care that they were two distinctly different
journals, with different readerships, traditions, styles and
sensibilities. She did away with multi-part series and long articles
that explored a subject in depth. Sure, sometimes they were boring
and easy to ignore (a three-parter on Oranges I always remember),
but if it was a topic that grabbed you, by someone like John
McPhee, you knew it was the definitive word on the subject.
What I also once loved about The New Yorker was its timelessness,
its indifference to the deadline mania that cracks the whip at
most magazines. If it was an interesting subject, The New
Yorker couldn’t care less if the subject wasn’t
in the news. The editors were not obsessed with a need to be
on top of the news, like most magazines, which believe: If
it didn’t happen last month, it didn’t happen and isn’t
worth covering. The articles might not have been the latest
word, but they were usually the last word.
All that began to change when the promotion department began
its “Yes, The New Yorker!” campaign, which I
never quite understood. Yes what? Suddenly, the magazine began
trumpeting itself in its own pages, a stunning departure, holding
festivals, and publishing showy covers rather than the wry or
lush artwork that depicted some aspect of New York City life
that you had seen but never appreciated, by artists like Arthur
Getz and Sempe, some of whose covers dating back to the `60s
hang in my home as canvases.
This leisurely attitude persisted until Brown came along, but
has been partly restored by her replacement, David Remnick, who
helped restore order to the chaos Brown left in her flashy wake.
It’s a better magazine now, but still not the magazine it
was at its height, and Brown’s legacy--a reliance on journalistic
flavors of the week--lingers in its pages. Remnick is in the
older tradition (as his own solid journalism reveals) but still
too willing to publish titillating “attention-getting”
covers (and lurid photos) in an effort to make a splash, as last
week’s purposely provoking cartoon proves.
©2008 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricatures are ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted July 21, 2008.
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