Sunday Funnies

Napoleon once said that the English caricaturist James Gillray “did more than all the armies in Europe to bring me down.” Here’s an example: “Manic ravings, or Little Boney in a Strong Fit” (1803).

Nast’s depictions of Boss Tweed are justly credited with bringing him and his corrupt Tammany Hall cronies down. Tweed famously said, “I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles. My constituents can’t read. But they can’t help seeing them damn pictures.”

 

On Jan. 8, 1942, Philip Zec’s cartoon in London’s The Daily Mirror showed an exhausted, torpedoed British sailor adrift in the Atlantic. The caption: “The price of petrol has been increased by one penny — Official.” Great Britain’s home secretary described the cartoon as “worthy of Goebbels at his best … plainly meant to tell seamen not to go to war to put money in the pockets of the petrol owners.”

Winston Churchill believed that the cartoon, which he interpreted as saying that the merchant marines’ lives were being put at risk to increase the profits of the oil barons, would undermine the morale of the merchant marines, and ordered an investigation to discover who owned The Daily Mirror. It led to “one of the stormiest debates in the wartime parliament,” when in fact all that Zec had meant to say was that gasoline shortages would put lives at risk.

Every week, Der Sturmer, the notorious anti-Semitic Nazi weekly (whose masthead slogan read: “The Jew is our misfortune”), ran vicious, ugly caricatures of Jews on its cover. A Der Sturmer Jew was easily recognized: ugly, unshaven, short, fat, drooling, hook-nosed. After the war, the Nuemberg Tribunal indicted 24 defendants, who represented a cross section of Nazi leadership, on charges of crime against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity (including an overarching conspiracy count). Der Sturmer’s Jules Streicher was the only editor among them. Primarily as a result of running weekly cartoons like “The Satanic Servant Judah” by Fips (1934), Streicher was found guilty, hanged, and cremated at Dachau.

When the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten commissioned a dozen cartoonists to provide depictions of Muhammud, hundreds of thousands of Muslims took to the streets in protest, embassies were shut down, Danish goods were boycotted, and the cartoonists were forced to go into hiding with million-dollar price tags put on their heads. Worldwide, more than 100 people were killed, another 500 injured. The most powerful depiction of Muhammud, however, was by Le Monde’s cartoonist, Plantu. commenting on the episode, he showed an artist’s hand gripping a pencil, writing again and again, “I must not draw Muhammud,” as the words spiraled into a portrait of…who else?

In Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, The New Yorker featured a cover cartoon by Barry Blitt showing Barack and Michelle Obama dressed in terrorist garb (rifles on camouflage-covered shoulder and all) doing a fist-bump. Not only did thousands of agitated readers protest, cancel subscriptions, and otherwise complain, but the then-candidate for president took time out from an otherwise busy schedule to denounce the cartoon as offensive. In fact, as New Yorker editor David Remnick pointed out, “It’s not a satire about Obama, it’s a satire about the distortions and prejudices about him.”

 

It was this Dec. 7, 2008, cartoon, which appeared in South Africa’s The Sunday Times, that caused South African President Jacob Zuma — at the time contending with fallout from charges against him of rape and corruption — to sue the Times Media Group for defamation by cartoon, alleging damages of 5 million rand ($600,000). Oh, yes, Zapiro started putting that showerhead on Zumas’ noggin after he mentioned in passing that the woman he had allegedly raped (his defense: it was consensual sex) was HIV positive, so he took a shower as a way of protecting himself from contracting the disease.