Is this ditz the only one who finds your Chon Day cartoon sexist and offensive? There's a simpler answer, Bob

The 1946 Chon Day cartoon nominated by New Yorker
cartoon editor Bob Mankoff as "the perfect cartoon"

by Ken

And that simpler answer, Bob, is: One can only hope.

You may recall that we tagged along on New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's quest for "the perfect cartoon," which came to rest on the one we see again at the top of this post.

I admitted that I had one technical problem with the cartoon: Until I was prompted, I didn't realize it was a gun that the put-upon shoe salesman was harboring in the shoebox. I thought he was just taking out yet another shoe in another surely-vain attempt to satisfy this clearly unsatisfiable customer, which made for only the most modest of jokes.

Once I was clued in, I thought the idea was pretty darned hilarious. But as Bob himself explained, a crucial component of the fun of the cartoon is the way it leads the viewer to its payoff.

Our gaze drops down from the face of the dowager, then to the right, first onto the form of a black shoe, then a second, and then a gun. The two black shoes delay, ever so slightly, our perception of the gun as a gun, thereby heightening the surprise. On the level of human dynamics and the psychology of perception, this is a perfect cartoon.

If you have to have the thing explained to you, it doesn't pack quite the same punch, and while it could be that I'm just a defective cartoon-viewer, nevertheless there you are. I guess it's maybe not my perfect cartoon. But then, I never set out in search of one.

Speaking of defective cartoon-viewers, Bob introduces us to a doozy in his latest e-newsletter/blogpost, "Perfect, or Perfectly Appalling?."

One reader took exception to my choice of the perfect cartoon. On Tumblr, she asked, “Am I the only one who sees this as sexist and incredibly offensive?”

To which the simple answer, it seems to me, is: What are you, lady, nuts?

Let's simplify the question to: Is this cartoon sexist? And the answer is: On a scale of zero to a kajillion, no way, José.

Inescapably, I think of the TV Jerry Seinfeld's beclouded Uncle Leo, who behind every slight and disappointment in his life the raging menace of anti-Semitism. The point, obviously (I hope!), wasn't that there's no such thing as anti-Semitism. Manifestly, there is. But its true poisonousness is rendered trivial if not nonexistent by people too clueless to know what it is -- and what it isn't.

In the cartoon, the beleaguered salesman isn't contemplating shooting the customer because she's a woman. He's been pushed to the brink by the session he's had with her, and one presumes by the endless succession of such sessions he's had with customer like her since he entered the business.

No, this doesn't mean that every female shoe-buyer is a living nightmare. But if the reader who was so incredibly offended by the cartoon doesn't recognize this all-too-real-world situation, you have to wonder if she's ever bought shoes, or maybe even wears them. Is she aware that the men's and women's shoe businesses are totally different enterprises? That the manufacture and sale of ladies' shoes has been designed to produce exactly this situation, and for some reason women have gone along with it.

Bob offers as backup "this disparity in the number of choices on Zappos":


Forget that I don't know what Zappos is. Really, I don't think this is necessary -- and if anything it understates the difference between the two fundamentally different shoe industries. We all know this, don't we? I think it's changed astonishingly little between 1946 and 2011.

Now, Bob characteristically offers a much more nuanced answer. He points out, first, that Day didn't depict the salesman in smirking triumph after unleashing the literally smoking gun on the old harridan. (In fact, he's rejiggered the original cartoon to show this possibility.)

By featuring our inner demons, rather than the better angels of our nature, humor helps those demons remain inside. And of all the arts, humor is most reliant on the demons to produce its effects. That’s why it’s hard to find cartoons about faithful spouses, kind bosses, diligent employees, honest accountants, competent doctors, or generous bankers, even though, in real life, all those are the rule, not the exception—except, of course, for bankers:

"And we will absolutely start lending again as
soon as we finish building our debtors' prison."

Did you laugh at that? Then, at least for a moment, you bought into the stereotype of the uncaring, greedy banker. Does this mean that you believe that bankers are callous and greedy? Perhaps—but that isn’t necessary to get the joke. Likewise, you needn’t believe lawyers are a mendacious lot to think that this is funny:

I confess I found both the banker and the lawyer cartoons hilarious. I guess somewhere there are people who are incredibly offended -- and in these cases I guess I can understand. But in the case of the Chon Day cartoon, no. Sorry, lady.

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