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A cartoon making fun of the Holocaust that appeared in a Rutgers student newspaper is causing unrest at the school. The Times describes the cartoon as such:
The publication, The Medium - a journal of news and opinion that features humor, cultural items and sexual and scatological references - ran a cartoon depicting a bearded man wearing a hat and sitting on the edge of an open kitchen stove in a carnival setting. Under the heading "Holocaust Remembrance Week," the cartoon's caption reads: "Knock a Jew in the oven! Three throws for one dollar!"The Star-Ledger first reported the controversy, noting that the regular editor, Michael Stanley, had been sick; Stanley told the S-L that he would have passed on the cartoon. The editor of the issue, Ned Berke, who is Jewish and has relatives who died in the Holocaust, told the Times, "Humor is a way of honoring them and trying to get over it and to laugh." A number of students and teachers are protesting The Medium, which has a history of pushing the envelope and making fun of ethnic groups, women, and gays. One of the big issues is the $15,000 in school funds the newspaper receives. The university has issued statements about the cartoon, including The Medium's status as a student group.
The Medium's website was reportedly wiped out by a hacker Friday; now, there is a message saying its bandwidth has been exceeded. Rutgers' main daily is The Daily Targum.
As Gothamist has observed before with the cartoon incident at Columbia this past February, student newspaper cartoons or humor columns end up causing some furor. The line between comedy and race/ethnicity seems to be a thin, wavering one, if you count the recent "Gay or Asian" "satire" from Details that sparked a protest, as well as any discussion around the cartoon, Boondocks (whose creator Aaron McGruder was recently recent profiled by the New Yorker). On an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, there was survivor confusion with a contestant of the reality show Survivor and a Holocaust survivor. On Chappelle's Show, Dave Chappelle regularly lampoons all races, such as having a blind white supremacist who is black or having a "Racial Draft" where different races choose Americans of mixed backgrounds (the blacks choose Tiger Woods, the Jews choose Lenny Kravitz). Humor can be subjective. We've found Curb, Chappelle's Show funny, but the Details piece and The Medium cartoon not that funny, so Gothamist's stance is definitely along the "I don't know how to define it, but I know it when I see it and think about it" line, to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.
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I think the Columbia students get bent outta shape over shit like this to make up for the guilt they feel over the fact that thgey will someday be everyone's boss.
For years bosses fostered racial strife to misdirect their employees anger, now they foster racial harmony cause they want to keep people docile as they fight over the same scraps.
So is the thin line between comedy and racism determined by the laugh-meter? If you're Larry David, Jewish, and critically acclaimed, you can get away with it, but if you're not very funny and a college student, there's hell to pay.
Todd raises an interesting question - is it offensive only when the satire is badly done? I never think Chappelle is offensive - is it just because he's good at it?
Does it matter whether the race or ethnicity of the joke teller is the same as the race/ethnicity of the butt of the joke?
Can blacks make funny, racist remarks about other blacks but not Jews or Asians, and vice versa?
What's the difference between lampooning racial stereotypes, and making a racist comment?
What's up with college papers and racist cartoons lately?
http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/news/2004/04/13318.php
There have been others...
Here's the deal: Larry David does racial humor. But you know what? He does it right. It's pointed. It's funny. And in perspective it's only racist to those who don't have the brain cells to think about the crux of the joke. In the case of this Rutgers cartoon, what's the joke? There is none. It's simply a bad joke. Strip away the supposed joke and what do you have. A bizarrely racist cartoon that is published during Holocaust Remembrance Week. Take the concept of that joke and put a black person on a stool with a noose around their neck and write "Knock a black person off the chair! Crack their neck! Three throws for one dollar!" and it's pretty offensive.
The difference is competence and skills. And in the real world, the reason why people like Larry David and Dave Chappelle and oither can do what they do is simple. They are critically acclaimed because they are good. And they know how to deliver the goods without simply regurgitating hateful racism in the process.
Racism is a fact of life in America. In a lot of ways it's a defining aspect of our culture. Lampooning ourselves is different from lampooning the deaths of millions. That's where the difference lies to me.
I agree with sideshow bob that racism is a fact of life in America. To be certain, there is less of it today than before, and maybe I'm being optimistic, but I think there will continue to be less of it in the future. The problem with humor is that just about anything can be funny if it's presented in the right manner.
Racism is really about sentiment. And with humour especially, it is not always easy to determine whether hate is the sentiment. So when somebody makes fun of their own race or ethnicity, we often rely on the reasonable assumption that they are not self-loathing and the statement is not motivated by hate. The truth is that even when people make jokes about other groups, it is often not the work of a black heart. What's hard is drawing the distinction, and my own approach in the close cases is to presume that the statement is not motivated by hate and therefore not racist in the absence of fairly strong evidence to the contrary. If the speaker says that they are not hateful, even if the joke is bad, I would take them at their word unless there is a good reason not to.
I've been intrigued by this site's discussion of "racism" ever since I read about in the context of the Urban Outfitters shirt and the Details fracas.
Technically, Encarta defines racism as "1. animosity toward other races: prejudice or animosity against people who belong to other races and 2. belief in racial superiority: the belief that people of different races have different qualities and abilities, and that some races are inherently superior or inferior."
Does the Rutgers cartoon qualify as rascist in these terms? Insensitive, yes. Offensive, probably. In poor taste, most likely. But truly racist?
I wonder if it's a current trend to equate stereotyping with racism. Are they truly the same?
I also wonder if there's a war being waged between high and low culture, good and bad taste(Frank Rich has been commenting on this in the Times). From National Lampoon's print magazine in the 70s, to Spy in the 80s, to many of the stand-up comedians (both successful and not) of today, there have always been voices that have tested, stretched and pushed the boundaries of taste. I'm struck that, today, there is a movement to squelch them.
I am in no way defending the Rutgers cartoon. But would those Gothamist readers who would punish or silence those who published it also silence Howard Stern? On some nights, he can be equally offensive and un-funny, despite his salary or the number of outlets who carry him.
Who decides the limits of free speech? And, on a distantly related note, what do Gothamist's readers think of the government's policy of restricting imagery from Iraq?
"The truth is that even when people make jokes about other groups, it is often not the work of a black heart."
This assumption is based on the concept that racism always comes from ill intentions. Most racism actually stems from ignorance. Case in point, in Seattle two kids were arrested for burning a cross on a church lawn. He had no idea what the larger meaning of such an act was. He was ignorant and simply a punk teen doing something for kicks. But does that make his act excusable? Not at all. Similarly many kids who draw Swastikas on walls of Syangogues do it to get a rise out of people and not from any deep seeded hatred.
So being ignorant/callous is really no excuse for such behavior no matter how ignorant the person is.
That said, it's often said that when people say "It's only a joke" that is actually furthest from the truth. Many people hide their own closeted racism in the form of "jokes". And I am consciously putting quotation marks around the word "jokes" in that case, because they really aren't jokes. They are simply bad/witty observations that balance on an axis of race and stereotypes.
For anyone who cares to read about racism and ignorance, click my name to go to the Seattle Times article on the cross burning teens.
Perhaps I'm missing something here (and not being able to see the cartoon itself, I may well be) but based on the description of the cartoon as given in the Times, I can't see what's offensive about it. In my experience satire tends not to endorse the things it depicts. Quite the opposite, it usually tries to reveal a shameful or uncomfortable truth that we would ordinarily overlook. We respond with a mixture of shock and revulsion, tempered by the simple absurdity of the image and then with a dawning realization that perhaps the distorted mirror of the joke shows us a side ourselves than we would prefer to ignore.
In this case, the author is showing us a scene where the Holocaust is trivialized by turning the week dedicated to its memory into a carnival. It seems to me that it's an indictment of those who would seek to profit by exploiting the memory of the Shoah - a group that certainly seems fair game for lampooning - and maybe our own lax attitudes towards remembrance that have allowed such people to prosper.
If the author had been seriously suggesting the depicted method of honoring the deaths of millions, not only would it be egregiously offensive, but it would also not be a joke and s/he would most likely have written an editorial instead. Perhaps the author erred by not taking the idea far enough to highlight its patent absurdidty. In any case, it seems likely to me that the author may have failed in getting the point across but I am loathe to believe that there was any evil intent.
Having read the responses from the various parties and noted that legal and constitutional issues prevent the university from taking any real action against a 19 year old trying to break into the big time through a manufactured controversy, Id like the staff at The Medium to consider the following. If you persistently cause distress to people under the guise of entertainment, and those people see that there is no legal recourse, what do you think theyll end up doing? Or do the staff at The Medium assume everyone is as mentally well balanced as they obviously believe themselves to be? If this cartoon had been published ten years ago, that would have been borderline, but right now there is a groundswell of anti semitism the likes of which hasnt been seen for sixty years. Its a different environment and budding Saturday Night Live writers play games at their peril.
What’s wrong with some of you?? You’re debating the semantics of racist? Who cares WHAT you call it, the cartoon IS offensive! The Holocaust is not subject matter that Larry David would joke about and comparing this kid to him is ridiculous. Millions of people were MURDERED. There are MANY other ways to “lampoon” the groups Arouet mentions than using such a flagrant dipiction of mass murder. And as for any “lax attitude about remembrance”, well Arouet should speak for himself. Again, you don’t see cartoons about the genocides in Rawanda or Bosnia or what’s going on now in Sudan…or even slavery in America…why is this different? This is not satire. This is a personal statement from the artist about his views of the Holocaust and Jews and it does NOT belong in a university paper.