So now that you've made your opinion known, here's mine:
So what? It is a political cartoon and if you are stupid enough to take it seriously; you weren't going to vote for Obama anyhow. I understand what the Obama campaign has said, I just flat out don't agree. Low information voters are one thing, people who take this stuff seriously do so for their own reasons.
The readers of the New Yorker are a fairly select group so the reading part of it will be them and not the low information group. The idea seems to be they'll see the cover on a news stand and take it from there or see it on the news. If it is on the news and the sound is on...? That kind of leaves the argument resting on the news stand. A person sees this on a news stand and thinks...what? Oh this cartoon just verified my worst thoughts after getting that email or hearing about it? Oh, pshaw.
5 comments:
You didn't have "not funny" as an option so I'm voting here.
A gaffe on my part...
I'm easily distracted so here's what bothers me far more than the cartoon:
The New Yorker's reaction. They are shocked! SHOCKED, that anyone would be upset. Puh. Leeze. There are dozens, nay hundreds of unwashed performance artists who'll create a work of art and readily admit it was done to shock. The BoE at the New Yorker doesn't have the same intestinal fortitude.
However, the right side of the blogoshpere's reaction has been priceless. "See! I told you he's a ... Wait. Is this a joke about us?"
I think it's not funny, a failed attempt at humor. My real problem with it is that it entirely relies on the New Yorker masthead to approach humor. If it were on the cover of National Review - or even of Newsweek - it would be announcing, in slightly amplified fashion, a story about how Obama Doesn't Love America or some such. In Newsweek, it woudl be written in Concern Troll style; in the more conservative media, of course, it would be more in the way of a denunciation.
The only reason it works as parody at all is because the person who sees it says 'well, the New Yorker can't be that dumb'. And that's pretty thin. If it had been paired with exaggerated trops about McCain, or if it had been a thought bubble from Karl Rove, it might have worked without the masthead. As it is, I'm not convinced it worked at all.
I'd say it worked for selling magazines. It misses being funny, but so did Swift's "A Modest Proposal." As satire it misses because it needs either to be funny or biting and it just isn't either. See Jon Swift for a bit different take.
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