The current New Yorker cover cartoon depiction of the Obamas is generating controversy, in part because there may be some people who don't get the joke. As a guest pointed out on this morning's NPR show On Point, the cartoon misses the mark because it fails to show anyone who might be the one holding its extremist, racist and insulting views.
This reminds me of an earlier controversy over a political cartoon that came out during a presidential race. The time was 1976 and the controversy was over Nixon's and Ford's arch-conservative Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz. On an airplane, he ran into Pat Boone and John Wesley Dean, the latter the former Nixon aide who blew the whistle on him. Dean was reporting for Rolling Stone, but Butz probably just saw him as an old White House cow-orker. So he told them some jokes...
Boone had made a comment about how the Republican Party had lost the black vote. Butz replied with a joke, which in the redacted Time Magazine version came out as, "the only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight p - - - - , loose shoes and a warm place to s - - -."
This was the end of Butz' political career. It didn't hurt Dean's new one in journalism, though. But that's not relevant to today's controversy. Rather, let's switch venues to Glassboro, New Jersey, where Glassboro State College's literary journal ran a cover cartoon about the subject. It was genuinely hilarious, an over-the-top visual representation of Butz' joke. A black man, drawn with exaggerated features, was sitting on an "Electro-Flush 2000", wearing clown shoes, and doing something (I'll leave this to the imagination) with a cat. Think of Berke Breathed's "Bill the Cat" for the style. In big letters, the caption: No Ifs, Ands, of Butz.
Okay, so it had the tag line that proved that it was satire, not an insult to blacks. And it really was funny, not in a subtle way but in a slapsticky way. Nonetheless, the cartoon drew a huge stink and the issue was recalled from the stands. A fair number of copies got into circulation, which is how I got to see a friend's copy.
The New Yorker cartoon is insulting without being as obviously satirical or tagged as such, yet its editors think it's appropriate. The Glassboro cartoon was less of a real racial insult than the New Yorker one. Maybe it's like IOKIYAR, where you can insult Democrats and hope it's taken one way.