More New Yorker

[lollardfish]

Ok, so I'm over the New Yorker thing. It's a well-executed cover that successfully encapsulates all of the preposterous lies about the Obamas. It's not a well-executed satire, to do that, they would have needed the image coming out of an elephant's mouth, or something.

Anyway, it didn't work as satire. But now, I hope, every time some idiot tries to spread lies, one can use the cover as counter-ammo.

Comments

[pied-piper70.livejournal.com]

Yeah, as someone who watches and appreciates and studies satire, I thought the execution of the cover was missing a couple elements to make it understandable as satire...Sure it encapsulates all the lies, but does nothing to represent the lies as ridiculous...It's like the artist thought that putting the Obamas in those clothes seemed like enough to make it into "funny/offensive" category and really it only put it in the "offensive" category...There's nothing in the picture to counter the opinion that's being represented...

Rule Number 1: If you have to explain the joke, it's not funny...

Oh I don't know

[regularpapi.livejournal.com]

I can certainly think of the cover as a BAD THING for Obama, in that the image is out there and all that--just like all the Fox News 'slips' that create mental links where none need be. But I can't imagine a viewer like myself (ie, one of those culturally elitist New Yorker readers one hears so much about) looking at the cover and thinking "oh, look, the New Yorker thinks that Obama is a muslim and his wife's Angela Davis." I think there is a middle ground, in other words, between taking it as satire with a specific comic zing in mind and taking it as criticism of Obama, and that's pretty typical for New Yorker covers (which are often topical in a less-than-pointed way): a kind of snap-shot of the discourse or something.

Tom Tomorrow (in the link above) gives two other examples of the same artist's covers--one with Obama and Hillary in bed together reaching for the red phone, and one of Buch and his cabinet flooded post-Katrina.