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That's funny?Jews in New Yorker cartoons

E-mail|Link|Comments (13) Posted by Michael Paulson March 24, 2009 12:15 AM

New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff tonight (3/24) is kicking off a New Center For Arts and Culture series with a talk on cartoons about Judaism. He was featured in Saturday's Globe talking generally about cartooning, but for the religion blog, I wanted to hear more about his thoughts about making fun of Jews, so I gave him a call:

Q: What distinguishes cartoons about Jews?
A: There aren’t very many cartoons about Jews. If you look back at the history of the New Yorker, you will see, especially in the '20s and '30s, when New York was changing, there were a number of, shall we say, interesting cartoons showing that change. I don't think the cartoons were anti-Semitic, but they would perhaps be looked at now in that way -- they recognized the changing nature of the city and the increasing place, especially in commerce, that Jews had in the city.
Q: What are cartoons about Jews like now?
A: In general cartoons poke fun at generic religion. So I have one with a guy leaving church, who says to the pastor, "I know he works in mysterious ways, but if I worked that mysteriously, I'd get fired.''

Q: Is there a special sensitivity to cartoons about Jews?
A: I think there’s a special sensitivity, in general, to cartoons about specific religions. New Yorker cartoons, in general, are not mean cartoons. Much of the humor in society is the humor of ridicule. But our cartoons are not the cartoons of self-satisfaction, but of self-dissatisfaction, and that makes them almost unique now in American culture, which is so polarized, and in which humor is basically a form of mockery in which the other is the fool, or the person whose balloon has to be deflated. We do that too, but most of the cartoonists do cartoons that are in some sense autobiographical. When you look at Jewish humor, for the most part, the jokes are quite layered -- they build up and eventually show some sort of logical inconsistency -- and a lot are philosophical. (In the broader culture) a majority of jokes have an aggressive component, a scatological component, or a sexual component, but Jewish jokes work through understanding the absurdities of the logic.

Q: Are there a lot of Jewish cartoonists at the New Yorker?
A: Jews are a tiny portion of the population, but are very well represented in the humor industry. Many of the cartoonists at the New Yorker are Jewish -- I’m Jewish, there's Roz Chast, and David Sipress. A classic cartoonist who represents certainly a Jewish sensibility is Roz Chast -- a real inward-looking sensibility, and the world as a worrisome, neurotic, yet humorous place, a sensibility which combines anxiety with humor.

Q: There have been several controversial covers depicting Jews.
A: I'm not involved in the cover, so that's not my controversy. But one thing everybody has learned is how intersected all media are. And to some extent, covers are different than cartoons -- they make much stronger satirical, even editorial, statements than the cartoons do.

Mankoff's talk takes place at 7 p.m. tonight at Temple Israel in Boston.

(Cartoon ©Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Magazine.)

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13 comments so far...

Cartoons about Jews are like jokes about Jews. Eliminate the anti-Semitic ones and I see them breaking down into two categories. The first almost everybody gets and find funny, and the second mostly Jews get.

As a Jew I thought Sarah Silverman's comments to Bill Maher were hilarious and could easily be a series of cartoons which would illustrate the point of this piece.

Maher, the unabashed atheist, asked Sarah about her beliefs and the difference between religious and cultural Jews. Like the 24/6 cartoon here, I'm not sure many non-Jews will find it amusing and many won't even get it.

You can watch the 9 minute interview on YouTube here (if the link isn't clickable, copy and paste into your address bar)

http://rufreeyet.blogspot.com/2009/03/great-interview-maher-with-sarah.html

Posted by HalBrown March 24, 09 08:25 AM

"...Like the 24/6 cartoon here, I'm not sure many non-Jews will find it amusing and many won't even get it."

I find this comment offensive ... I am a practicing Roman Catholic and I understand this cartoon and find it very amusing. Don't be so insulting.

Posted by Anne Maher Heller March 24, 09 12:46 PM

Hal Brown, funny, you don't look anti-goy.

I guess there is a reverse snobbery here. The cartoon is very funny, even to dumb non-Jewish atheists like myself.

Posted by Richard McDonough March 24, 09 01:02 PM

Count me as an Asian-American non-Jew who understood the 24/6 cartoon and found it funny on several levels. I grew up knowing many friendly Jewish kids and had an Asian teenage friend who worked at the synagogue on Saturdays. Please don't be too hasty in dismissing how well a joke or cartoon may be received by the broader public.

Posted by Jokes Without Borders March 24, 09 03:20 PM

Let us come together and feel free to offend each other

Posted by Big J March 24, 09 03:26 PM

Oh, you mean the New Yorker is sensitive to ethnic and racial issues, like the Obama cover?

Posted by Samson*13 March 24, 09 03:35 PM

I get continually offended that there is an "Articles of Faith" section on here.

Posted by Pete March 24, 09 04:30 PM

Really Pete- its nothing more than the Bridge or Astrology features for enthusiasts of a particular subject

Posted by Big J March 24, 09 04:56 PM

I've been reading the NEW YORKER (or at least ogling the covers and cartoons) since I was a youngster in the mid-1960's; my parents subscribed, and here we are so many decades later, and I'm still an avid reader.

Unfortunately, the NEW YORKER's absolute silence re: the Israeli Defense Force's most recent spate of outrageous human rights abuses (Gaza, this time!) just sickens me. Have a look, folks, maybe you can correct me, but as best I can tell the NEW YORKER has maintained a strict cover-to-cover silence about Israel's slaughter of the innocents in Gaza this year.

I presume the NEW YORKER hopes we their gentle readership thus can one day chirp "...oh, gosh, we just didn't KNOW!". Shades of you-know-where, 1944-45. However inconvenient, the fact remains: No matter where ANY of us falls on the complex Mideast issues, this one just isn't complicated!

I'm unsure, as to their recent coverage (if any) of Gaza, as I can no longer stomach reading the damn magazine.

Posted by John Rood March 25, 09 10:11 AM

Oh for god's sake, John Rood, I've seen your ramblings on the same topic in every sort of unrelated Globe forum that mentions Jews (loved the one you stuck in an article about charitable donations affected by Madoff's Ponzi scheme). I would understand these comments in a political article, a report from Israel, etc., but here the only connection is Jews. So, explain to me how that's not racist.

Posted by kittycat March 25, 09 12:13 PM

I didn't get offended by Hal Brown's comments. Oh, I got the joke all right, even though I'm not Jewish, and despite the fact that I live near Lisbon, Portugal - a country with a very small Jewish minority. We have our own jokes about the alentejanos (from the Alentejo province) and nobody minds them, least of all the alentejanos themselves.

Posted by Rui Batarda March 26, 09 06:56 AM

a truly "funny" cartoon cuts accross all lines....24/6 is a hoot. but then i'm just a not- so- practicing Texas Episcopalian.

Posted by PearlandPeach March 26, 09 09:59 AM

Glad to see that cartoon again. My very Jewish mother thought it was funny.

Posted by miminqueens March 31, 09 11:20 AM

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Michael Paulson covers religion for The Boston Globe. He shared in the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, won the Mike Berger, Templeton and Supple awards in 2008, and is a four-time winner of the Wilbur Award.
E-mail mpaulson@globe.com.

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Harvey Cox, the Hollis professor of divinity at Harvard University, marks his retirement by asserting a little-used right of his professorship -- to graze a cow in Harvard Yard. Photo, by Barry Chin of the Globe staff, taken on Sept. 10, 2009 in Cambridge, Mass.