Cartoon Riots

How surreal has it been to see the words "cartoon" and "rioting" in the same headline lately? For those of us plying our trade in the normally obscure trenches of editorial cartooning, recent stories of the Muhammed caricatures sparking riots in the Muslim world have given pause. How close have any of us come, in crafting subtle statements meant to provoke debate, to mass misinterpretation, cultural offense or even mob violence?

Effective cartooning relies on the grasp of a subtle visual language most of us absorb through years of exposure to a common culture. I count on readers being able to understand that a certain statement a character is making is meant to be sarcastic, ironic, sardonic, tongue in cheek, or plain stupid. How do we telegraph these intentions? Beats me. It's an unarticulated language pulled off through the subtleties of expression, gesture and a million other nuances. And a cartoonist spends a lifetime mastering that toolbelt of scalpels and sledgehammers.

And there are a lot of readers who are less adept at that language than others. I hear often from readers who misunderstand my intended point, having cruised through a visual stop sign or failed to grasp some cue I've painted bright red. I have to think this is one of the reasons cultural senses of humor fail to translate, why British humor, for example, eludes some of us or other cultural humor seems too subtle, broad or obtuse.

All of that said, the current controversy owes more to gross insensitivity on the part of the Danish cartoonists and their offending newspaper than it does to anything lost in translation. We in the western world have learned to roll our eyes at offending material, write it off as idiocy and turn the page. The Islamic culture, on alert to signals from an unsympathetic and dismissive world, has had enough of western condescension.

Drawing cartoons, for all its healthy broad protections, has never been a license to gratuitously hurt people. I fail to see any larger mission being served in the Danish cartoonists' intentions than simply giving offense, kicking people who are different than themselves. I have no sympathy for anyone using the tools of what I have always considered to be the high calling of editorial cartooning simply to hurt feelings. There are times when, in the course of healthy debate of significant issues, feelings get hurt. That is impossible to avoid. But to begin a drawing simply intending to offend people seems unethical to me.

Hell, it seems psychotic.