Jokes and Butts: Can We Imagine Humor in a Global Public Sphere?

Abstract

In his essay titled “Drawing Blood” for Harper's magazine in June 2006, written as a response to the Muhammad cartoon affair, Art Spiegelman argued convincingly that a cartoon is, first and foremost, a cartoon. It sounds straightforward, but is it really? Following Spiegelman, we can define caricatures as charged or loaded images that compress ideas into memorable icons, namely clichés. A cartoon must have a point, and a good cartoon can change our perspective on the ruling order. Spiegelman opens his discussion with classical caricatures such as Honoré Daumier's 1831 depiction of King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua and George Grosz's 1926 attack on the “Pillars of Society” (“Stützen der Gesellschaft”) as beer-drinking, pamphlet-reading, swastika-wearing men without brains. Spiegelman acknowledges these cartoonists as “masters of insult,” who often had to face trial or imprisonment for their transgressions (45). The question is whether the twelve cartoons of Muhammad, published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005, are in any way compatible with the great tradition of caricature.

Construction of gender identities via satire: The case of Juvenal

“…Still, despite this common denominator, the role of satire in identity construction is hardly explored in previous studies. There are implicit or explicit suggestions in literature, yet they are not fully developed; some studies suggest the role of humour in the construction of social subjects' identities (Attardo 1994(Attardo , 2008Archakis & Tsakona 2005;Twark 2007;Habib 2008;Wright 2011;Schaefer 2013; for more subtle implications see Basu 1999;Carrell 2008;Göktürk 2008;Ruch 2008;Kuipers 2009;Morreall 2009;Condren 2012;Williams 2012;Wedeen 2013;Devi & Rahman 2014). Davis (2008), for instance, refers to Meyer's (2000) classification of humour's functions into two major categories of unity and division.…”