viz.

Tim,

I continue to not agree with your overall position (I’ll try to explain why below), but I think you have pointed out a number of places where my argument is in need of more nuance.

First, when I called the cover “sophisticated” I believe I meant that its lack of context signaled the assumption of a certain sophistication on the part of the viewer, i.e. the cover would be received as satire, therefore it wasn’t necessary to provide a frame signaling it as such. This is quite different from saying that the joke itself is sophisticated. I agree with you that it is not. (That crudity is, I think, largely the reason I find it funny.)

Second, it seems I gave the impression that anyone who dares criticize the piece is humorless and dour, unable to pick out the most basic points of the joke. That would be a ridiculous generalization and was not what I intended. I apologize if that is how I came across.

Instead, I meant to indicate that the criticisms of the cover that I have heard seem to be excessively narrow. To return to Lee Siegel’s comment in your original post: he complains that the cover repeats untruths about the Obamas, thus making it bad lampoonery. This statement suggests that he doesn’t understand what it means to lampoon something, or that he thinks that the only lampoons that are okay are those that deal with “mainstream” sentiments and which “position the target of a slur . . . in relation to the producers of the slur” (whatever that might mean). Would the cover be greatly improved in his eyes if the image was depicted emanating from the mind of a little old lady sitting in front of her computer? To do so would, I think, diminish its impact as a fever dream of ultra right wing ridiculousness.

I think Siegel’s definition of satire is incorrect, and, as such, I think he is missing something essential about the nature of satire in a world where the genre is dominated by shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (if you disagree, I would challenge you to subject an episode of one of these programs to an analysis based on Siegel’s definition and see how well it holds up). By Siegel’s measure, Colbert is also a failure because it reproduces ideas from a non-respectable space (Fox News’s O’Reilly Factor) in another more “respectable” one (whatever that might mean) without accompanying commentary, presumably some equivalent of a giant sign that says “I didn’t mean it.”

This idea seems behind the curve to me. Perhaps I misspoke in characterizing that lag as missing the joke.

Third, the point I was trying to make about audience (however inept) was that most who are familiar with The New Yorker would perceive the cover as being satirical. Would everyone in the world share this perception? No. But the audience of The New Yorker is not everyone in the world, so criticizing the magazine for failing to appease this audience seems a bit unfair to me.

I guess I don’t follow your example, possibly because the social norms governing the two situations (what it’s ok for a magazine to do, and what it’s okay for strangers on the street to do) are so different. I would disagree with your implication that the goal of satire is “to promote healthy discussion,” however, as well as your suggestion that the only acceptable emotions prompting satire are those that are “serious.” I would say that the cover’s is more indebted to The Daily Show than to “A Modest Proposal,” and that this connection gives it more freedom than to merely be serious. Why does this cover have to have “heft”? Maybe this would make it more important, but the lack surely in itself doesn’t make the whole offensive.