What’s So Funny?
Andy Mason
Double Storey
Review: Ed Suter
I wish I could summarise this review in the form of a cartoon. To achieve that I would need to be an expert artist and a skilled distiller of words.
It would help to be a brilliant caricaturist, to have a strong grasp of the nuances of South African politics, and to possess – lest we forget – the ability to make you laugh.
It’s a tall order, that makes one realise that when all those elements connect in a cartoon, it stays in the mind as the definitive distillation of that day’s news story.
When US cartoonist Berke Breathed, famous for his Bloom County cartoon strip, was asked where to turn when the US was running out of enemies to lampoon at the end of the Cold War, his response was: “Look, the Russians are wimping out and we’re running out of bad guys.
“If the alternatives are mullahs, drug lords and the press, I’ll always go with the ones who dress the funniest.”
Mason’s fascinating and thoughtful look at this country’s finest cartoon moments demonstrates that cartoonists in South Africa will never have to resort to lampooning those who dress the funniest.
What’s So Funny? neatly bookends South Africa’s cartoon history with a cartoon published on September 8, 1819 and another published on the same date 189 years later.
That more recent cartoon, published in the Sunday Times on September 8, 2008, has entered into our country’s lexicon as what Mason calls, “the most infamous cartoon in our nation’s history”: Zapiro’s Rape of Lady Justice cartoon.
Mason begins his history of cartoons in 1819 with George Cruikshank’s parody of the idea of South Africa as a bountiful Eden awaiting the British settlers and wraps it up with a brilliant dissection of Zapiro’s use of the showerhead attached to President Zuma’s head.
When using cartoons as a prism through which to view the last 189 years, it appears they occupy an uncertain space (“a notoriously swampy patch of ground”, according to the author) of either reflecting the prevailing attitudes, or poking fun at the ridiculousness of those attitudes.
Is the stereotypical 19th century representation of Africa as a place where the white man in a pith helmet ends up in a cooking pot, while a large black African chief stokes the coals, an accurate reflection of the fears of Victorian society?
Mason argues that those cartoons were the work of a cartoonist simply doing his job: exaggerating repressed anxieties and attacking the British government’s light-headed 1820 settler scheme.
As a talented cartoonist himself and a friend of many of the cartoonists and artists discussed in the book, Mason’s history is both thoroughly researched and a personal journey. He combines his development as an artist, and an informed dissection of the codes and symbols used in cartoons through the ages, into a fascinating account of the art form.
He makes the point that “the form of an artistic work is indivisible from its content”, citing Derek Bauer’s work in the Weekly Mail in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an illustration. Bauer’s visceral and hyper-graphic interpretation of those dark days was art as a two-dimensional horror movie: something one had to view through hands over eyes.
Painful at times to look at, his cartoons were an accurate reflection of the urgency of the message and the darkest of times in this country.
If nothing else, the book serves as a welcome reminder of Bauer’s work in all its crude, blood-splattered glory.
Mason also looks at the techniques of cartoonists to make their points: the use of a repeated phrase in the work of Madam and Eve creators, Stephen Francis and Rico, becomes more effective as a put down when deployed repeatedly.
In post-election 1994, when Eve says to Madam: “You hear that, Madam? Free at last!!” Madam barely looks up from her newspaper to respond: “Well done… don’t forget to do the dishes.”
Twelve years later Madam has an identical response when Eve enthusiastically celebrates Women’s Day.
The ongoing debate as to whether Zuma’s image has been rehabilitated sufficiently to merit the removal of Zapiro’s showerhead from his cranium shows how well a joke works when repeated and just how far the cartoonist’s impression of the president has burrowed into our collective conscience.
As the reluctant bearer of the showerhead, Zuma is suing for R5 million in damages for the humiliation and alleged damage to his reputation.
Charles Schultz, creator of the Peanuts cartoon strip, is quoted in the book as saying cartooning “occupies a very low rung on the entertainment ladder”.
This book reminds one of the venom and yes, the entertainment within some of this country’s finest cartoons.
l Suter is a photographer and designer whose work will be on display at the Design Indaba next month.