‘Not funny’ and ‘distasteful’ are in the eye of the cartoon beholder
On Friday I scanned a proof of the back page of our Sunday Viewpoints section where we publish a half dozen or so editorial cartoons. I usually pause over the Ted Rall ones because he seems bound and determined to offend, but none of them seemed all that outrageous to me.
On Saturday, our wire editor alerted me to an Associated Press story about people upset with a cartoon by Chip Bok published in The Oklahoman in Oklahoma City. It was one those in our Viewpoints section. I read the comments, took another look at the cartoon and decided to let it stand.
The cartoon depicted Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as a piñata and President Obama in a sombrero asking a group of elephants, “Now, who wants to be first?”
It was hard to tell if the target of the gibe was the nominee, the president or the Republicans, or all three.
AP quoted Rossana Rosado, publisher and chief executive officer of El Diario La Prensa in New York, saying, "On first view you just see her hanging by a rope and that's a very disturbing image. It's offensive mostly because it's not funny. It's supposed to be satirical and humorous and it simply isn't funny."
After the R-J published it I got a grand total of one complaint. A lady wrote in saying, “Dear Mr. Mitchell, I was saddened to see that your paper chose to include in its cartoon section the Chip Bok cartoon, it is both tasteless and demeaning to the nominee Judge Sotomayor and our president. It was a self-indulgent exercise in stereotyping ... I would hope we might at some point get beyond this distasteful stuff.”
I shared her comment with our cartoonist and philosopher Jim Day, who commented, “An assay of the typical political cartoon would show the presence of irreverent humor as well as elements of meanness, spitefulness, prejudice, tastelessness as well as a tinge of old fashioned patriotism — and the truth.
“Cartoons which lack these components are usually called the funnies — such as 'Family Circus' and 'Blondie' — which visualize not the extremes, but the comical norms of everyday life.
“When … we arrive at a point when we are ‘beyond such distasteful stuff,’ it will only be because all political cartoonists and columnists have been rounded up and sent off to a re-education camp.”
Jim, I think I hear the sound of hammers. Can't tell what they are building yet, but somehow I don't think it is a re-education camp.
