Above is an editorial cartoon by Bruce Beattie of Copley News Service that ran in Friday’s USA Today. And, we assume it ran in dozens of newspapers that subscribe to Copley’s service. (Oh, sure, there was a caption– a reference to the president’s recent address to the UN– but that’s irrelevant to what we’re discussing here.)
The depiction of the comic– with his loud, checked sweater, bowtie, bald head and bug-eyed expression– is something that has always bothered us.
And the recurring theme of the comedian being subjected to thrown objects is even more bothersome. What has us patricularly upset in this instance is the fact that the audience has hurled a tomato, a pie and a knife(?!?) at the performer.
Beattie is employing a set of visual stereotypes that might be as much as 75 years old– The misshapen, bald head, grotesquely elongated nose, the dated clothing– all hearkening back to vaudeville, a culture that ceased to exist in the 1920’s! And the idea of an audience throwing objects at the comic probably pre-dates vaudeville!
We’ve seen this tired visual cliche used here and there in the recent past– the original cover design for Richard Belzer‘s book on standup depicted a rotten tomato smashed against it. Subsequent reissues of the book removed the tomato.
Old habits die hard– cartoonists, graphic designers and others seem incapable of letting go of the rubber chicken, the Groucho Marxian nose-and-glasses and the squirting flower as archetypes. In Jungian terms, these objects are “an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from the past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious.” It is this toolkit that enbles cartoonists and others to conjure up entire sets of concepts and associations with just a few strokes of the pen– it is their shorthand.
But our attention is drawn to that knife! Are we being overly sensitive? No, not at all. The illustration shows a comedian having a deadly weapon tossed at him. Had the person throwing the knife been accurate, it clearly would have hit the victim in the head! A pie in the face is bad enough, but it would have merely been humiliation and not serious injury or death. Same for the rotten tomato.
We must wonder why Copley, USA Today and Beattie felt it was acceptable to portray violence against a comedian. Is this indicative of some sort of a lack of a societal sanction against such an act? Are comedians so reviled, so despised that we’re all comfortable with a deadly assault against one?
We believe that the entire standup community is owed a public apology from USA Today, Copley and the artist, Beattie.