(HOST) The cover of a recent New Yorker magazine features a satirical drawing of Barak and Michelle Obama portrayed as Muslim terrorists in the Oval Office. As Vermont Humanities Council executive director and commentator Peter Gilbert explains, the resulting uproar has its roots in the very nature of satire and irony.
(GILBERT) Satire is inherently a troublesome art form. "Satire," the dictionary tells us, "is the literary art of diminishing a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it . . . amusement, contempt, indignation, or scorn." Satirists point at human vice or folly in order to cure it.
Satire is problematic because it’s often shocking, even offensive.
Even some people with good senses of humor think that there are certain things you shouldn’t joke about. And invariably, there are people who don’t get the satire. Indeed, the better the satire – the more subtle and exquisite it is – the larger the number of people who don’t get it. That’s understandable: tone is easy to misinterpret. Moreover, satire’s purpose may be to cure human folly by ridiculing it, but if you’re foolish, you may not recognize that it’s ridiculing you.
You may remember reading in school a shocking essay by the English satirist Jonathan Swift entitled, "A Modest Proposal." In it, Swift implicitly advocates social reform by arguing that the way to deal with Irish poverty and overpopulation is for parents to sell their children for the wealthy to eat – thus benefiting rich and poor alike. Despite its outrageousness, some people in 1729 still didn’t get the satire.
Satirical cartoons have been around American politics a long time.
There is, for example, a famous drawing of President Andrew Jackson portrayed as a despotic monarch, standing on the discarded Constitution. But that 1834 cartoon points to part of the problem with "The New Yorker" cover: the send-up of President Jackson was drawn by his opponents who really did think he was putting himself above the law. It, like most political cartoons, criticizes the person portrayed. In contrast, "The New Yorker" cover seeks to satirize not Barak and Michelle Obama, but the people in this country who insist on believing, without a shred of evidence, that he’s Muslim and they are, perhaps, terrorists. The people who believe this, however, aren’t depicted on the cover, or even referenced; the magazine didn’t, for example, have the same drawing in a thought balloon over the head of Joe Six-Pack. This cartoon is, unlike the typical political cartoon, ironic. It means essentially the opposite of what it appears to say.
And so the people satirized don’t necessarily see the cover as ludicrous, especially at first-glance. And few of them see how it points out how credulous, foolish, or ignorant they are.
Editors of "The New Yorker" could hardly have chosen a more volatile thing to satirize: their cover deals with race and religion, prejudice, ignorance, and fear of terrorists. And they could not have chosen a more sensitive time or context: a close Presidential election featuring the first African American major party candidate while the country is at war. Is it a brilliant satire or an egregious lapse in editorial judgment? Could it be both? Time will tell what effect, if any, it has on public opinion.