Jokes and Butts: Can We Imagine Humor in a Global Public Sphere?

Extract

In his essay titled “Drawing Blood” for Harper's magazine in June 2006, written as a response to the Muhammad cartoon affair, Art Spiegelman argued convincingly that a cartoon is, first and foremost, a cartoon. It sounds straightforward, but is it really? Following Spiegelman, we can define caricatures as charged or loaded images that compress ideas into memorable icons, namely clichés. A cartoon must have a point, and a good cartoon can change our perspective on the ruling order. Spiegelman opens his discussion with classical caricatures such as Honoré Daumier's 1831 depiction of King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua and George Grosz's 1926 attack on the “Pillars of Society” (“Stützen der Gesellschaft”) as beer-drinking, pamphlet-reading, swastika-wearing men without brains. Spiegelman acknowledges these cartoonists as “masters of insult,” who often had to face trial or imprisonment for their transgressions (45). The question is whether the twelve cartoons of Muhammad, published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005, are in any way compatible with the great tradition of caricature.