Friday, July 18. 2008The View from the Couch: Ha Ha HaThe New Yorker cover is a triumph of marketing over meaning. Magazine covers, as most everyone during the last week seems to have forgotten, are there to sell magazines. The swells at The New Yorker wanted to join the national political conversation big time (even bloggers want to join the conversation) and sell product. It's been a while since we have had a New Yorker cover that generated much buzz. Bears wearing iPods don't help magazine copiesrush off the newsstands. So, when we hear endless debates about "parody," "satire," and other English Lit 101 topics on both cable and network news this past week, we can only say, well done New Yorker, your aim has been accomplished. Get the folk talking about your slick mag. The boys at the New Yorker have done it before, with the black on black 9/11 cover, the orthodox Jew and hot mama cover, and now with the Obamas in the Oval office, fist bumping (I have heard a number of racist riffs on that gesture), while the Old Glory burns in the fireplace and Osama stares down from the wall. Michelle looks more Assata Shakur than Angela Davis and Barack is in some generic pass-for-Muslim outfit. That'll get them talking! But the pious palaver about irony, etc., has been a real pain. As usual, it's about money, all you smart people out there. Humor and Obama might end up as a course at college soon. It is hard for white comics or pundits to be funny about Obama, since most of the humor would have a racial tinge. A lot of American humor is ethnic and can be told by one of the tribe, but doesn't fare well when uttered by an outsider. Jokes about blacks have more or less vanished in polite society, so much so, I can remember being surprised when I first stumbled across HBO's Def Comedy Jam in the 1990s. The borscht belt for black folks. It was raw and a lot of it funny. But, it still takes daring for someone to cross the color-line, ethnic line, stature line (jokes about dwarfs, etc.). Eminem might be the exception that proves the rule. Here's one that does: Don Imus wouldn't have been hounded off the air for making fun of the Rutgers women basketball players if they had been white. But, since they were black, as was his insults, he was. He can dump on white women all he wants, and he does. In any case, the I-man is back. But, it is still about money and as everyone drives past the people's Dow Jones ticker, the gas station price signs, changing daily, most have their eyes on all that irony, satire, and parody the oil men in the White House have pulled off for the last eight years. Trackbacks
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