So the comment in class the other day piqued my interest, specifically the one about New Yorker cartoons being not only hard to understand but not exactly tickling the majority of our funny bones. I definitely have to agree on that one. Prime example by George Booth from 1987.
We see a wife cleaning dishes from the kitchen, saying to her husband "Basil, do you think the center is going to hold?" who is sitting in his armchair reading a paper, while a dog and a cat look away from each other............Look at it carefully. Are you roaring with laughter? Do you even get it? Because I sure don't. I reminds me of cisco104's blog about value judgements in determining the worth of cartoons. Apparently just because it's in the New Yorker, it is therefore high culture which takes an elevated sense of comical acumen to discern it. I guess it doesn't even matter that it's not funny, it's the New Yorker.
Now obviously this is a value judgement on my part, but I think from last class we were in general agreement that the New Yorker's cartoons lack a little something called humor. If this ran in the Sunday paper, it's just as unfunny, but would probably be deemed even moreso since now it's not "high culture".
So here's a little challenge I'm curious about. How many of you can find a New Yorker cartoon you think is funny?
Even funnier than their cartoons
By the way, I laughed more at your comment "Are you roaring with laughter? Do you even get it? Because I sure don't." than at their cartoon
I tried to take you up on your challenge and found something even funnier: they actually have a caption contest to see who can come up with a funny caption.
So... the real question is: Can The New Yorker find a caption for their cartoons that is funnier than the stuff they come up with?
Yeah, I'm lost too hah.
I have no idea what they're getting at in that cartoon... the only thing that made me raise an eyebrow (and you'd think that would be the reaction that the artist didn't want) was that the dog in the picture kinda looks like a pyramid... and I think their ceiling fan is on fire. Maybe we're too "un-sophisticated" to get their extremely high-brow humor?
Set-up for humor?
Yeah, I was confused because I wasn't sure what was relevant to the joke or not....is the ceiling light cracked? Is she talking about that, or the potted plant poised over his head? What is the cat looking at so intently? And why does the dog look like he's got a pyramid on his head...is he trying to balance it? Is THAT what she's talking about? I just have no clue, at all!
The phrase "Will the center
The phrase "Will the center hold?" usually implies a fragile balance between 2 competing interests. (Usually used in the context of 2 political parties)
The best I can come up with is that the dog is trying his best to not eat the cat. He looks agitated. The wife is wondering how much longer this can go on before he either shows restraint or decides it's lunchtime.
Maybe in whatever political environment was around in 1987, this may have been real relevant and obvious to the readers.
That being said, I still think the cartoon sucks.
I keep thinking about this comic
I know it's been a while, but I keep coming back to this. Besides the apparently ambiguous caption, the composition of the image is really odd as well. As noted by AlexanderTheGreat, there are several different visual anchors that seem to draw your eye toward them (the pointy-headed dog, the radial cracks in the ceiling, the conspicuously held up plate in the background), but none of them seem to resolve as its "meaning."
What bugs me is that I can't decide whether to read that lack of resolution as an immanently destabilization that deconstructs its semiotic domain by resisting the (logocentric) determinism of signification (thus preventing the center from "holding"), or whether it's simply poor composition.
The caption itself refers to W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming", which contains the line, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold". The poem is about impending doom and political upheaval, so there could be a reference to contemporary politics (USSR falling apart, Berlin Wall, etc.).
But the joke could also be that working class folks like those in this domestic scene have no use for poetry, so the juxtaposition of their daily lives with something by Yeats is meant to make either one or the other look ridiculous.
I'm not sure I like any of those jokes.
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