Is it really necessary to label "The Borowitz Report" as "satire"?

What's wrong with this picture?

by Ken

Let me confess that I'm the one who appended the January 15 "Borowitz Report" as an update to Part 11 of Noah's herculean 2016 In Review America Off The Rails series: "Comrade Trump: Inauguration Entertainment Update!."

It seemed an obvious call. No sooner had we put up Noah's update to his earlier post on the extraordinary difficulty the Trumpinistas have been having getting entertainers to perform at their guy's inauguration (Part 3, "The Trumpf Inauguration Committee Finds The Perfect Inauguration Entertainment At Last!"), and also getting the folks who had signed on to keep from weaseling out, than here comes Andy B with this wicked post:



Luckily, I can report that after the fact Noah found the addition of that Borowitz Report altogether appropriate. So that's not why I bring it up. I bring it up because what you see immediately above is not the way I originally presented it. No, the way I originally presented it is the way newyorker.com presented it, which was more like what you see atop this post. (For reasons I'll explain in a moment, it's not exactly what you see atop this post, which is merely a re-creation.)

Sometime after posting, I found myself looking at this again, and I found myself bothered again. No, "bothered" doesn't cover it. I was shocked and appalled, just as I had been when I'd first looked at this and noted that newyorker.com was now labeling The Borowitz Report as "SATIRE FROM THE BOROWITZ REPORT."

Really? Is it honestly necessary to explain that what Andy B produces is "satire"?

For that matter, does "satire" really define what it is? I'd never really thought about it. I guess have to acknowledge that satire sort of describes what a Borowitz Report is, but somehow putting a label on it seems to constrict it, to close it off. In truth, it seems to me that when you see something like that head, "Karaoke Machine Backs Out of Performing at Inauguration," you immediately know two things:

(1) Chances are pretty good that it's not literally true, because it seems pretty unlikely that a karaoke machine would be able to back out of performing at the inauguration.

(2) You just have to read it, because, well, it's bound to be fun and it expresses a larger truth.

I guess this is what satire does, being fun and expressing a larger-than-factual truth. Yet somehow slapping the label on seems to me to short-circuit the whole process of discovering, deciphering, and connecting. And, oh yes, smiling. Somehow when we start with that "SATIRE FROM" label, the necessity of smiling seems to diminish -- a chunk of the fun is taken out.

I might add that I don't know how long newyorker.com has been doing this -- you know, slapping that "SATIRE FROM" label on Borowitz Reports. I don't know because, as I've been realizing, I have been clicking through to a lot of Borowitz Reports lately -- since, oh, about November 3. Not because I don't think they'll be funny. On the contrary, what Andy B does maybe better than anybody I'm aware of is to find "funny" in news that wouldn't seem to have a lot of "funny" in it -- and not only funny but true.

True-to-reality, that is, not true-to-facts. Because Andy B always understands and respects the underlying seriousness of the subjects he targets. No, I think I've been looking away out of resistance to the very idea of finding anything about this post-November 3 world amusing. It's too horrifying.

Until that karaoke-machine-having-second-thoughts came along. I knew I could handle that, and I also knew that I wanted to read it right away. And I was right. Not even that heavy-handed "SATIRE FROM" label could spoil it. But not for want of trying.


POSTSCRIPT: I HAD TO DO SOMETHING

As I just noted, once I found myself looking again at the version atop this post, the longer I looked at it, the fidgetier it made me. Until finally I had to do something. I recalled that I had considered originally lopping off that "SATIRE FROM THE BOROWITZ REPORT" label. But I held back, I think out of some sense that it would be somehow misrepresenting the way the piece had been presented, which was pretty much the point of my presenting it with use of the screen shot. Now, looking at the thing more and more compulsively, and realizing that even without that slug, the piece would still be clearly presented as a Borowitz Report, I came around to the view that I should have lopped it off.

And finally, even though it was a post that already wasn't new, and might never be looked at again (though I always hope!), I had to do it. I reopened the thing in Photoshop Elements and lopped the slug off, then inserted the new version in the post. As soon as I verified that it looked OK, I deleted the original version, and I felt better. Of course, once the original version was deleted, it was gone, which is why, as noted above, I had to re-create it in order to present it for this post.

And I still feel better. My only regret is that I didn't have the sense to do it originally.

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Je Suis No Tears For The Creatures Of The Night

-by Melody Siegler

One of my long time best friends, Bob Filbey, sent me a cartoon he had just done.  

My "career" has just made new headway. Every editorial cartoon I've ever done has been submitted for free to our 3 local publications (in Humbolt County). None were ever published locally. Because of the Comic Show at the Sewell Gallery  on display this month in Eureka and the execution of several cartoonists in France, the North Coast Journal requested I do a comic about the event, so apparently I will finally be published locally in that rag this week! I presume there is no pay-- a typical ploy by for profits and non-profits alike, because everyone knows artists work for free because they can best afford it...

The [White] House Trap Game was published in Comic Review and Comic Relief nationally, for which I was paid a hefty $2 back in 1986 (and you may wonder why I don't do more cartoons...).

Filbey continues:

I saw an interview of a real, full time professional editorial cartoonist on PBS last week who lamented that there are only about 30 of his kind left in the US, and that the number of cartoonists killed in Paris was more than the number of pros employed in New York, California, and Texas COMBINED! With such little diversity (and pay), it's no wonder cartoons in this country have become so bland.

Political cartooning, a noble endeavor a century ago, has been (mostly) reduced to inflammatory images meant to sing to the choir or lame platitudes intended to provoke nobody. I got in a hairy dispute with a local cartoonist who didn't care if political cartoonists disappeared from earth (even though he's partially paid as one). He thinks the only bar political cartoons must pass is being funny.

Humor is golden, but political cartoons can do far more than that: they can educate, they can juxtapose, they can make people think of relations and perspectives they've never considered before; that's just not what they do anymore.

I had to ask Filbey about this cartoon from Patrick Oliphant, published in the NYTimes and elsewhere on March 25, 2009 (Universal Press Syndicate distributes Oliphant’s cartoons).  The cartoon garnered various comments, as you can read here.

Filbey’s response: “I think Pat (Oliphant) is probably pick of the litter of the remaining 30 professional cartoonists. As to the cartoon you sent, I'm not fond of Zionists and tend to agree with Pat, but it's really not the fault of the Jews...“

Here’s Oliphant’s cartoon of  January 08, 2015 (published by GoComics). I didn’t ask Filbey about this one, but I think he would approve.

I also asked Filbey about Mike Luckowich, and this cartoon in particular:

Filbey said:

Not familiar with him, but checked out about 50 of his images on Google. He is funnier than most, sometimes uses effective juxtaposition, but often takes the singing to the choir route without much analysis.

And, no, I didn’t ask him about the Rob Crumb cartoon:

But that’s a whole ‘nother story, here and here. But, in response to a comment to another friend, he responded “Yes, Melody, aging cartoonist Robert Crumb has become fossilized in his own warp.”