As editor of The New Yorker for the last 10 years, David Remnick ’81 has seen plenty of cartoons, from single-panel drawings inside the magazine to the satirical images often featured on the cover. In August, Remnick spoke about political cartoons with PAW’s Brett Tomlinson.
What do you look for in political or satirical images? What makes a piece cover-worthy?
Political covers, first of all, ought to have something to say, and they ought to be funny. That sounds like a very simple recipe, but it is about as hard to accomplish as walking across a tightrope or bungee jumping into the Grand Canyon. The number of artists who do it for us successfully and consistently you can pretty much count on one hand.
For example, let’s take Barry Blitt. An example of his genius occurred on the week when two events were in the air. One, [Idaho Sen.] Larry Craig had been caught in a men’s room in Minneapolis, trying to seduce an undercover cop. ... And at the same time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declaring that in Iran, there are no homosexuals. Now these are fairly disparate elements, and the image that Barry came up with was to have Ahmadinejad reading a newspaper in a bathroom stall with a foot inching under the wall of the stall toward his own foot. What that did was instantly, in the funniest way possible, join these dual hypocrisies, Iranian and American. Hypocrisy was the target, and Barry hit the bull’s-eye.
In July, Blitt’s cover satirizing the smears of Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle ’85, was viewed by some as offensive. Did you anticipate a negative reaction?
Whenever you publish a political image, you expect that some people are going to be offended. But you want them to be offended for a good reason. ... What Barry Blitt had in mind with “The Politics of Fear” was to take all the lies, stereotypes, and false images that were being painted of Barack Obama, on Fox News and in the kind of attack books we now see being published, and throw them into one image to highlight just how crazy, preposterous, and pernicious they were.
With an African-American and a woman in the presidential race this year, have artists and editors been more sensitive about how they portray race and gender?
Well, you don’t do anything rashly or blithely, and you should think about what images you’re publishing every bit as much as you think about what articles you publish. I think instinct can be a highly overrated quality in an editor. Mind has to play a great role. But not in the service of making everything acceptable to everyone. ... Caution to the point of blandness does no good at all.
Do you have any favorite cartoonists, either now or from the past?
I started my career at The Washington Post, and at that time, there was a cartoonist on the editorial page named Herblock. He was a kind of Promethean genius. He produced an editorial cartoon every day, just about, and he was very genial and sweet in person but a killer on the page. I don’t know that science can prove it, but I have a feeling that Richard Nixon might have lived longer had it not been for the relentless attacks of Herblock.
Do you think political cartoons can affect the way a person votes?
No, I really don’t. I think it can contribute to the cumulative way people think about something. Someone trying to think about Tammany Hall who saw Thomas Nast’s political cartoons over and over again would probably be affected by that. ... You can say the same thing about photographs — the first photographs of the Civil War or the photographs that appeared in Life magazine and elsewhere during Vietnam. Does one image change a person’s political views in an instant? I doubt it. But it has some cumulative effect and some importance.