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About That CoverJuly 15, 2008 Do I have an opinion about the New Yorker cover? I thought you'd never ask. You bet I do. If you haven't seen it yet, there are images of it all over cyberspace, and probably in the print media as well. (Damn the copyright laws; full speed ahead! This is news!) It's a full-page, four-color caricature of Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. He's decked out in turban, caftan, and sandals, very like the portrait of Osama bin Laden hanging on the wall, minus the beard. He's fist-bumping his wife, who's got an automatic rifle slung on her back and a 'fro reminiscent of Angela Davis et al. in the heyday of the Black Panthers. An American flag is burning in the fireplace. What were they thinking?* I subscribed to The New Yorker and read it regularly for years, till I fell so far behind I feared being crushed by a collapsing stack of magazines. I loved the nonfiction and "got" most of the cartoons. My sixth-grade class voted me the class clown (female), and in the years since I've rarely been accused of lacking a sense of humor. But this cover didn't strike me as funny; at first it didn't even occur to me that it was supposed to be funny, or humorous, or satirical. Just -- Huh? What were they thinking? Out in cyberspace some people are accusing anyone who didn't get it of being stupid or of lacking a sense of humor. The satire, they say, is "obvious." At first I couldn't figure out what they were thinking either. Finally it dawned on me that the big reason some people took the illustration for satire is that it's on the New Yorker cover and New Yorker covers are often tongue-in-cheeky or darkly humorous. On one hand, this is like laughing at boring performers just because they're on a comedy show. Or laughing because everyone else is laughing and if you don't laugh everyone will think you're clueless. On the other hand, and more important, this suggests that the humor, the parody, the satirical intent, is almost entirely in the context, i.e., the fact that it's on the cover of The New Yorker. Would the humor be so "obvious" if the illustration appeared on the cover of, say, the National Review? on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal? If Ann Coulter displayed it while doing guest commentary on Fox News? I doubt it -- at least not to the same people. Right-wingers, racists, and Obama-haters would be laughing their heads off, and accusing the outraged liberals of lacking a sense of humor. Humor doesn't exist in a vacuum. It has a context. That's one big reason why we don't all find the same things funny; the more heavily humor depends on context, the less likely it is to travel well. Another is that humor can be, and often is, used as a weapon. The women's movement is forever being accused of lacking a sense of humor -- something I found especially funny in my women's community days, because we were laughing all the time. We had a sense of humor, all right; the problem was that a lot of men didn't think it was funny when they didn't get the joke, or when their foibles were the target of the joke, or when we didn't laugh at their tired old sexist jokes. So New Yorker readers and anyone "in the know" about The New Yorker will probably get that the intent was satirical, even if they don't think the cover is funny. Fine -- as long as the cover doesn't travel beyond the realms where everybody knows about The New Yorker. In the minds of some, it seems, those distant places are barely imaginable, and it's even harder imagine that the people who live in those distant places are anything but morons who believe everything they hear on Fox News and voted for Bush. If I give the TNY editors the benefit of all my many doubts, I still end up wondering if their understanding of the world is really that limited. Maybe it is. Or maybe they were just snuggling up to their presumably affluent, white, oh-so-sophisticated audience and whispering, "See how open-minded and clever we are? We know this is a parody." Point out to those editors that, out of context, their illustration feeds into some really ugly, possibly dangerous stereotypes, and maybe they'll gaze down at you through their trademark monocle and sing some lines from Tom Lehrer's song about rocket science: "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, says Wernher von Braun." They'll tell you that intellectuals and literati are supposed to be above all that. So why didn't they go all the way and have Barack and Michelle piloting a plane into the White House wall? Maybe because their presumably affluent, white, oh-so-sophisticated readers who were in New York on 9/11 wouldn't have found that quite so funny? *That's a direct steal from Christine Lavin's song "What Was I Thinking?"
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