Even though Laurie Friedrich already did a terrific job of getting at the New Yorker brouhaha yesterday, I still feel the need to throw in some of my own loose change.
Here goes.
The New Yorker cover was about as sophisticated a piece of satire as a penis drawn on a desk.
As anybody who’s been teaching for more than 15 minutes knows, in pretty much every classroom you enter there will be a picture of a penis drawn or carved onto the surface. This is not, I would argue, a fabulously insouciant form of deconstructive satire emerging from the anxieties surrounding gender/sex issues in contemporary culture. This is not even a jejeune exploration of a particular individual’s nascent and charming outpouring of self-realization. It is, on every level, one-dimensional.
It’s a dick on a desk.
Neanderthals drawing stick figures on cave walls had layered, informed, soul-searching, and complex artistic experiences. It would be tough to make that argument about the cover of The New Yorker and those who conceived of the concept behind it. If one of the Neanderthals had drawn a mastodon stomping one of the stick figures — which, for all I know exists on a cave wall in France somewhere — then that would have been satire, or at least you could have seen it as an attempt at satire. But when I looked at the New Yorker cover, I didn’t see anything nearly as droll as a stick figure being stomped on by a mastodon.
What I saw was an equivalent of a football stadium of boors on Coors singing “Born in the USA” as if Springsteen’s lyrics were a national anthem celebrating the caring, generous, nurturing attitude of the U.S. government toward its veterans rather than the heartbreaking, darkly satirical, deeply fatalistic song it actually is.
Or put it this way: the New Yorker cover has all the subtlety of the cover once run by Hustler (published when Neanderthals were still roaming the earth) where a woman’s body was shown being put into a meat grinder as a visual “joke” about the idea of women being treated as pieces of meat.
Ha bloody ha.
Yeah, yeah, sure, the appreciation of any kind of humor depends to a great extent on appetite and aesthetics, which naturally leads to disagreements over the nature and boundaries of humor itself (it was George Eliot who commented with her usual dry understatement that, after all, “A difference of taste in jokes, is a great strain on the affections”), but some stuff just isn’t funny.
If you wink at somebody, they have to know what you’re doing is winking and not think you have a rock in your eye or a twitch; if even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked, then the audience for satire should be able to tell that something is being mocked rather than sanctioned.
Or maybe that’s just my girlish way of looking at things.
If you want evidence of the easy, albeit deliberate misreading of the New Yorker cover, I suggest you take a look at this collection of quotations assembled by Jake Tapper.
Not that I’m bitter, but somebody should wipe off the desk.
