I hadn’t planned on writing a long post but I wanted to address the issue of the NY Post’s cartoon.
Many of you are aware of the cartoon in which police shoot a monkey, which is taken from a real incident in Connecticut recently. The caption of the cartoon says:
Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.
I leave it to others to infer intent but there’s some research — below — that everyone should look at. And it comes in the form of a very short article on the Situationist and a tape of a Professor talking about her research.
Apart from racial undertones, this cartoon attempts “humor” based upon referencing an incident that has left a woman disfigured and struggling for her life. Either way, the Post has stepped over the line. But that was likely by design, given its ownership.
Yes, it’s hard to see where the humor is. And it’s not that people don’t differ somewhat on what they find funny. Comedy has a general formula that’s missing here, and nobody is claiming that it’s actually funny.
What’s more interesting to me is whether the monkey/ape imagery was chosen for it’s association to African-Americans or whether it was arrived at through accidental, subconscious associations. Racism, as shown by Modern & Symbolic Racism, is now often an unconscious attitude. However, creating a cartoon takes a lot of time and thought, so the cartoonist had to carefully consider it’s content during the cartoon’s creation. This makes it much more likely that he fully intended it’s message and is using it’s figurative nature as a ‘plausibly deniable’ shield.