http://voices.washingtonpost.com/comic-riffs/?hpid=news-col-blog'The Stimulus Monkey': Is Today's 'NY Post' Cartoon Racist?
The Rev. Al Sharpton has denounced it. Some cartoonists and commentators have lambasted it as racist. Other commenters have declared that it's just a "bad" cartoon, but one lacking in ugly intent. And its editor has defended it.
Today's New York Post cartoon by Sean Delonas -- which references both the stimulus bill and the Connecticut news story about a chimp that was shot after mauling a woman -- has stirred the kind of controversy that perhaps no illustration since Barry Blitt's New Yorker magazine cover last summer has.
Here is the comedian's take on it:
It seems to me that there are two ingredients to a joke: subject and object. What is the joke about and who is it on? What makes a joke funny is that the covert subject and object are often different from the overt subject and object. The best jokes are often ones that you get hours or days later.
For example, my friend's routine where he gives me a tour of his house in his best Mrs. John F. Kennedy voice and matter-of-factly comments on the negroes in the neighborhood being better behaved than you might expect is very funny. The subject, the joke, is that Mrs. John F. Kennedy would never say such a thing, especially while giving a tour of the White House to a news crew. The object of the joke is the teller himself. He is setting himself up as the target of the audience's ire. He is deriving pleasure in making himself a target. He is deriving pleasure from the fact that his audience is all in a snit precisely because they don't get it. He is disciplining his own audience.
But I see nothing so nuanced in this piece. It's not funny and it doesn't even have any deeper meaning. It's a waste of ink. There is no art to this piece whatsoever.
It's just stupid. This piece is the definition of a cucka joke.
