It's Funny How Humor Is So Ticklish

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Call it the attack of the Jonathan Swiftboaters. A New Yorker cover illustration, showing Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim fist-bumping his gun-toting wife, fell afoul of the humor police yesterday. To some, it was satire. To others, it was aid and comfort to the malice mongers who hide under the rocks of American politics. In the end, it was both.

"Successful" satire -- mildly funny, generally anodyne and broadly therapeutic -- needs an "April Fool's" moment, when the joke is revealed and everyone is at least invited to have a laugh. No, Bob, it's not Friday, it's still Thursday; that report isn't due for another 24 hours and you can climb off the ledge now. Like a practical joke, satire can be hysterically funny without a shared catharsis, but that's often a cruel form of humor. To be effective -- if by effective one means a teachable moment, a transformative bump forward in self-awareness -- the humor must be widely appreciated.

New Yorker editor David Remnick found himself defending satire that seemed to go astray. On Saturday, before the July 21 issue even hit the newsstands, he said, "Satire is offensive sometimes, otherwise it's not very effective." Yesterday, he acknowledged the offense given, and the emotional pitch of the current presidential campaign, but stood by his cover.

The illustration "had a title -- the title is 'The Politics of Fear' -- and there is also a context," he said. "It is appearing in the New Yorker." By which he meant everyone generally understands where the magazine is coming from, that it is "liberal-minded" and doesn't traffic in the kinds of slurs and innuendo the cover obviously lampoons.

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