Cartoonists Tom Toles (above) and Ruben Bolling (Tom the Dancing Bug) argue that a satirical drawing, like a turbaned Obama on a New Yorker cover, are only successful if they work without context:

… it’s actually less clear what the satirical intent of The New Yorker cartoon is. It just shows an America-hating, terrorist President Obama… if this same cartoon were created by Sean Delonas and published by The New York Post, I’d think it was satirizing Obama himself, and that’s a very different (opposite) point — it would be tasteless and offensive. A cartoon shouldn’t rely on the context of its creator and publisher in order to successfully make its point. [Bolling]

But context absolutely matters. Shared experience matters. Sepia Mutiny posting a Shiva thong on April Fool’s after years of dinging cheap Hindu exotica is very different from furnishing stores doing so. Commenters here slinging the term ‘macaca’ among friends is worlds apart from a Virginia senator with a racist rep calling out the brown man at a public event. Bolling’s satire, though fun, is the opposite of subtle:

Where the New Yorker cover fails isn’t that it relies on the reputation of a tweedy New York literary mag. The intent is clear enough. It’s that it’s badly executed. Simply repeating racist sentiments without transforming them or otherwise adding value isn’t really satire. You have to reveal the ridiculous essence of a sentiment or exaggerate it so badly, its absurdity is exposed.

Merely stringing together several wingnut talking points doesn’t make this successful satire. The New Yorker’s restrained graphic style works against the humor. And the Obamas aren’t well known enough that their image implicitly contradicts the illustration. Obama did once try on African ceremonial dress, including a turban. Many genuinely wonder whether Michelle Obama is a black power activist. Context is missing.

The comedy of inversion only works when the opposite fact is firmly established — complimenting Jay Leno on his delicate chinm ribbing A-Rod about his pudgy middle. As is, the New Yorker cover merely revisits the sins of the turbaned Obama email allegedly distributed by Hillary’s campaign.

Jon Stewart devoted an entire Daily Show this week to a full-throated defense of the New Yorker, slamming the MSM for itself spreading false Obama smears and doing a man-on-the-street segment triple-teaming passers-by to deconstruct satire. The MSM absolutely deserves the hit. But Stewart is not rendering a judgment on the cover, he’s pushing an agenda. As a prominent comedian, his job is to expand the safe harbor of satire and the First Amendment rather than to assess the cover on its own terms.

My point is far more damning: the cover fails not in terms of morality, but on its artistic merits. Discrimination against the turbaned is an active and burning issue. Is calling a Sikh man a terrorist in public funny if you nudge him in the ribs first? If Vanity Fair posted a cover of a Hindoo in a turban eating rats or monkey brains, would that qualify as satire? Depends on how well Americans understand Hinduism (not very) and on how the cover’s done.

Here’s a parody of the flap that’s far more clever than the source material. It’s titled Al Qaeda Outraged by Patriotic Osama Cover:

I’ll desist here because of the old saw about how explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: nobody’s much interested, and in the end the frog dies.

(ht: anonandon, Turbanhead, Ennis, AK)