On the Line

Anthony Feinstein in The Globe & Mail.

Strongmen have an extraordinarily thin skin when it comes to laughing at themselves.

It is a striking that these men with enormous power, vast armies, lethal weapons, and apparently limitless self-confidence fear the simple cartoon. 

Is it because they know instinctively that Mark Twain was correct when he had one of his characters observe, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand”? 

Hitler’s fury at being lampooned by the cartoons of David Low pales, however, when compared to the violence unleashed more than half a century later by 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. 

Considered deeply offensive by many Muslims, the cartoons triggered protests, boycotts, and riots, with dozens killed and the storming of the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine, by two gunmen that left 12 people dead. 

Between 1830 and 1920, more than 350 caricature journals were established in France. 

Such was the unease of the ruling political class with this development that King Louis Philippe reintroduced press censorship, lifted following the French Revolution, to control it. Tellingly, reporters were spared the king’s scalpel. They were considered less of a threat. 

Louis Philippe’s pique was also personal. 

His head, somewhat pear-shaped to begin with, had been skilfully morphed by caricaturist Charles Philipon into a pear. 

The image began appearing on graffiti in Paris. Adding to the insult, the word pear in French – la poire – had the double entendre at the time of implying a dupe or an idiot in French slang.

On Oct. 20, 1965, President Johnson, recovering from elective gallbladder surgery, lifted up his shirt to display his surgical scar to reporters. Johnson later claimed he had done so to dispel rumours that he had been hospitalized for cancer. 

This moment of presidential disinhibition was not lost on cartoonist David Levine, who depicted LBJ with his shirt raised and his cholecystectomy scar visible in the shape of Vietnam. 

Levine’s brilliant, prescient drawing endures to this day, highlighting Johnson’s failed foreign policy that had become a scar on the body politic and which ultimately undid a presidency.

According to the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, another factor that gives cartoons their potency to wound is that “visual grammar doesn’t function the way verbal grammar does.” Cartoons have no punctuation to add nuance to the message conveyed. 

As a result, text lends itself to a more civilized discourse than caricature. 

Given the degree to which skilled cartoonists exquisitely hone ridicule when portraying their subjects, the profession comes with risk, particularly if those offended carry great power.

“When despots rule, cartoonists die,” noted David Wallis in his book Killed Cartoons. 

History backs him up. The Dutch cartoonist Louis Raemaekers had a bounty put on his head, dead or alive, by the German government for portraying Kaiser Wilhelm as Satan during the Great War. 

During Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-1983), legendary cartoonist Héctor Oesterheld was “disappeared” by the junta in 1977. 

In 1987, Palestinian Naji al-Ali, an illustrator, was murdered on a street in London. 

In 1995, Algerian cartoonist Brahim Guerroui was kidnapped before being murdered. 

In 1999, rebels in Sierra Leone killed leading cartoonist Muniru Turay and burned down the office of his newspaper. 

And then there is the Charlie Hebdo outrage in which five French cartoonists – Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb), Jean Cabut (Cabu), Georges Wolinski, Bernard Verlhac (Tignous) and Philippe Honoré (Honoré) – were murdered in their Paris bureau. 

That some of these cartoonists were killed in the midst of open, democratic societies supports humorist Art Buchwald’s observation that “no totalitarian government can afford to be ridiculed.” 

It is sobering to reflect that 11 years on from its cruel decimation, Charlie Hebdo is once against under siege. 

The magazine is facing legal proceedings in Turkey for “insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan” by publishing a cartoon of him in October, 2020, that depicts him in his underwear lifting the dress of a women with a head covering.

The killing of cartoonists underscores a message on repetitive loop for viewers to the website Cartoonists Rights: “The most absolute form of censorship is murder.” 

Another message informs viewers that “fear of criminalization” is a cartoonist’s biggest worry. 

Additional concerns include displacement and exile, which was forced on 23 cartoonists between 2020 and 2022.

Some cartoonists chose to resign rather than see their work internally censored by an editor fearful of angering a newspaper’s owner or bucking strong political headwinds. 

Such was the choice of Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes when her proposal for a cartoon depicting the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos and other billionaires offering money to the President was rejected. 

The number of full-time political cartoonists has declined markedly since the beginning of the millennium, attributed to newspapers shuttering, less opinion page space and a move toward digital, less lucrative freelance work.