The New Yorker, home of zinger cartoons for people who carry more than a little bit of hubris about their smarts, devoted the cartoons in its October 6, 2008 issue to the tanking on Wall Street.
Charles Bersotti, for example, drew two turtles talking together, head to head — one without a shell. The turtle sporting the shell says to the other, “Yes it’s nice. But it’s lost twenty percent of its value in the past year.” Cute, I thought.
Tom Cheney draws God standing on a cloud, hands on hips, his secretary next to him with clipboard in hand. The two of them are watching a huge meteor that’s heading straight for Earth, with God commenting in exasperation, “I suppose they’ll expect a bailout.” Cute, too, I thought.
But my personal favorite is Robert Mankoff’s. A woman and a man are at a cocktail party, talking to one another with drinks in hand. The woman says to the man, “A banker, eh? Can you make a living at that?”
Hear ye artists, poets and musicians! Sweet revenge, at last! Payback, in one cartoon, for all those years where our berets, pencils, and violins were the butt of cartoonists’ jokes!
Sure, most of us arty folk never earn the big bucks. We console ourselves that even if our couches are worn, we live our lives devoted to the specific meaning derived from making art. And now we have a great epitaph, too: “At least I wasn’t a banker.”
