The Charlie Hebdo catastrophe of Jan. 7 has stimulated a lot of conversation and debate here and abroad over the so-called limits of free speech—and raised questions in this country about the state of American satire.
Just how far is “too far,” and how much should—how much do—cartoonists engage in self-censorship? And why?
This week I interviewed a quartet of leading American cartoonists who’ve come out of the alternative media universe and squarely represent the tradition of American political satire in their own way. Each cartoonist has engaged these questions in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo.
Our cover this week also tries to engage this question. With this cover, the Bohemian aims not to shock or offend, but to hold up the sacrosanct role of the alternative media: Do not shy from controversy.
Readers may know by now that Charlie Hebdo takes its name from the beloved pumpkin-headed Charles Schulz character. While the generally benign character of a typical Peanuts strip may not, at first, jibe with an impression of the scabrous and biting cartoons of Charlie Hebdo, perhaps it’s the existentialist bent of so many Peanuts strips that makes Charlie Brown a piece of American culture that the French can get with.
Santa Rosa’s Schulz Museum didn’t want to discuss the fact that the magazine named itself after Charlie Brown. “We don’t have a comment on that particular story,” says Gina Huntsinger, marketing director at the Santa Rosa–based museum. Pressed, she added, “It’s something that’s tragic that happened in Paris, and we feel it should stay with those people—not to take away from that tragedy in any way.”
Other cartoonists have taken up the Charlie Hebdo cudgel in their own way. Shannon Wheeler is the author of the popular strip Too Much Coffee Man, and was very quickly out of the Charlie Hebdo gate with a strip that we’ve reprinted here depicting the slain Charlie Hebdo employees ascending to heaven, with some choice commentary. It’s a priceless, bittersweet strip.
Wheeler says he had an initial impulse to not “go there,” but realized very quickly that he didn’t just want to do a pat comment on free speech, “something corny with pencils,” and that he had an obligation to honor the Charlie Hebdo heroes by having a little bit of fun. They’d have wanted it that way, he says.
But the American media—corporatized, sanitized and afraid of “offending” anyone, let alone an advertiser—is a dominant roadblock for American satirical cartoonists these days, Wheeler says. “People are afraid of offending. People are afraid of pushing limits,” says Wheeler. And, critically, “people are trying to make money. I think that’s what it boils down to a lot, in terms of why the humor is so conservative here.”
Cartoonist Danny Hellman identifies a strain of argument that runs “I support free speech, but . . .” as being a particularly insidious cop-out. “It’s not free speech if you put the ‘but’ there,” he says, adding that the average American doesn’t bother to get under the hood to understand the satire Charlie Hebdo was engaged in. Surface impressions rule the day.
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“You have to be French and you have to be versed in French politics,” says Hellman, who rejects any conjecture that Charlie Hebdo had a “racist” undertone to it. “You can be against racism and be racist at the same time, but clearly they weren’t a white supremacist rag, like a lot of people in this country seem to think they were. They made fun of racists just as much as they made fun of religious figures. They were clearly just out to make fun of everything in a rude way.”
Jen Sorensen, who has been curating strips by Muslim cartoonists, and writing on it, believes that an “I support free speech, and . . .” approach is the more fruitful conversation to be having after the attack. “If we’re going to be talking about freedom of expression, there are some people who want to talk about the cartoons,” says Sorensen, the 2014 Herblock Prize winner.
Sorensen has been interviewing Muslim cartoonists about Charlie Hebdo. “These are educated Muslim cartoonists who are doing very brave work and whose lives are being threatened,” she says. Those cartoonists, she says, should have a voice—and it should not be drowned out in a froth of free-speech absolutism.
“I have two perspectives on this,” says Sorensen. “As a political cartoonist, it’s horrifying and awful, and I have a vested interest in not being attacked for drawing something. I absolutely support that. But then there is a conversation that follows.”
Through her interviews, she’s come to see “what different people in various minority groups think about this. And the more marginalized people are,” she continues, “the more complicated the responses are. I feel that we can firmly condemn the attacks, but can also talk about the cartoons and how they are being interpreted by broad populations.”
Skip Williamson is up there with R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman as one of the heavyweight cartoon satirists of the underground comix movement that sprang up in the convulsive American 1960s. Williamson is an absolutist on free speech issues. He cut his cartooning teeth in the racially polarized environment of America, circa Jim Crow.
One classic, jarring strip he’s been sharing on Facebook features a man in a car, with Mississippi license plate. The man has a lynched African American hanging from his rear-view-mirror. Today, that kind of gut-punchy stuff is basically off-limits, especially in mainstream publications that simply do not want to offend readers or make them uncomfortable.
“So many people here are so ready to pounce on anything that remotely smells like racism,” says Hellman, a veteran illustrator who’s done a couple of covers for the Bohemian in recent months.
Hellman makes the point that I’ve been thinking about, too: To Pakistanis and others in the Arab world who are protesting the Charlie Hebdo strips, the West is already the kingdom of the infidel. From their perspective, “we expect the infidels to do awful, disgusting things,” he says, “so why should they then kill them for being infidels? Why expect people in foreign countries to follow the rules of your religion? It’s just intolerance, plain and simple.”
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Hellman notes that American cartoonists have other, somewhat more mundane concerns. “In this country, the risk of not being published is greater than being shot by radical Muslims. Who’s going to publish something that looks like Charlie Hebdo in this country? Why can’t we have good, nice, obscene satire? Someone who’s doing that sort of stuff here can’t even get into print so the jihadists can kill them.”
Hellman invokes the spirit of the Realist and early alternative newspapers, a golden age of American satire. “Things were so much more vibrant and hip back then. What happened to our media and popular culture that the blood just got sucked out of everything, and we’re left with this profit-driven, lowest-common-denominator ‘marketplace of ideas’?”
What indeed.
In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, George Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer uttered a phrase to a roomful of reporters that tipped the hand quite clearly when it came to the descent into madness that was about to ensue. Americans “need to watch what they say, watch what they do,” he infamously uttered.
It was as much a taunt as it was a threat.
But for every outrageous Ari Fleischer statement, there’s an overly sensitized person out there on the lookout for the unholy triumvirate of Racism! Sexism! Homophobia! to shout at the next person who dares to not watch what they’ve said. An entire generation, and maybe two of them, has been indoctrinated with the accepted progressive wisdom of the era, steeped in the academic cover of “identity politics” and set loose into a media atmosphere dominated by a lynch-mob chorus of instant outrage.
Wheeler agrees that Fleischer’s chilling comment is of a piece with the latter-day politics of shaming. The debatably glorious advent of Twitter has put an emphasis on beheading infidels, metaphorically, who don’t get with the sensitivity program.
“We’re still getting used to the idea that people can get shut down,” says Wheeler. “You do make the joke that is sexist or racist, or is interpreted that way, and people call for the end of your career. They call for your head. This person should be fired, they should never work again.“
That’s a far cry from the heady and glorious days of the underground comix movement.
Williamson’s first published cartoon, which ran in papers all over the country in the middle of the 1960s, depicted two garbage cans as a way to highlight the abject injustices and hypocrisies of Jim Crow. One said “White Trash,” the other said “Negro Trash.” Nobody called him a racist for that cartoon strip, which he penned when he was all of 16 years old.
“Today if I published that, I’d get a lot of flak about it, but back then, it was just part of what people were doing and talking about,” says Williamson.
Williamson calls for “no censorship ever.” And he, like Hellman, laments a bygone era in American satire. “National Lampoon is gone, Mad is gone, The Realist is gone, the great satire magazines that existed at the end of the last century and into this—they are just not there anymore.
“The Charlie Hebdo murders show what a dangerous business this can be, if you do it right. If you have inner demons, you need to express them, you need to just do it. It might get you killed, but go for it!”
Sorenson’s take on the post-Hebdo conversation on expression, she says, is a little more nuanced than a lot of her colleagues. She stresses that she’s in the “I support free speech, and . . .” camp, as distinguished from the “free speech, but . . . ” camp, which can be exemplified, for instance, by Pope Francis’ utterances on the Charlie Hebdo massacre, which are worthy of savage mockery.
Sorensen also has more faith in the sturdiness of American political satire than her crusty male counterparts. “I have heard a lot of commentary to this effect, that compared to Charlie Hebdo, American satire is very weak. ‘Satire is dead in America.’ I guess I agree to the extent that daily newspapers have lost their edge, have become a lot more cautious,” she says.
“But in some ways I feel that political satire is alive and well in America.”
