An ironic twist of the Jihadists’ despicable, cowardly, and evil actions is that they bring even wider attention to the “offensive” comics than ever before. I, for one, would probably never have looked at them; I’m not sure I had even heard the name “Charlie Hebdo” before today.
Having perused the comics, of course I don’t find them offensive at all, and couldn’t have less respect for the religious wackos in the world willing to kill people because of them.
But I don’t think they’re actually all that funny… I suppose many if not all of them are meant to be more provocative than funny.
Thoughts?
*Along with photos of the whole grim affair. If respondents to this thread have better links for the comics, by all means post them!
Not especially funny - though maybe something’s lost in translation, so I wouldn’t hold onto that opinion. It’s possible I’m also just biased against them because so many people I know keep sharing them with me so I’ve seen about five of them twenty times each already.
They’re not meant to be funny, they’re meant to be cynical and offensive. Think punk.
Also, just looking at the front pages gives you only a glimpse. The actual paper is more or less very loud editorial cartoons front-to-back.
For those curious to see more, it’s probably best to know that many of them are very sexual and NSFW.
I haven’t read it in 15 years, but they frequently skewer the Front National and as far as I can tell, they haven’t been kind to opponents of gay marriage. I’m not sure why you would call them racist or homophobic.
To me, they’re (some of them) racist in the same way Nazi caricatures of Jews were racist - often eerily similar, with the same hooked noses and flaccid lips. It’s not the content of the cartoons that’s racist (I like quite a few of those), it’s the artistic shorthands used to depict “Muslim”.
That might be intentional, you can also find many cartoons depicting Africans in blackface, complete with the use of the word nègre in the captions, which in this context is as offensive in French as it is in English.
If you scratch past the superficial offensiveness of the cartoons and read the editorials, it’s not hard to see that often those depictions were meant to be caricatures of attitudes
they were criticising, e.g. condescending attitudes in foreign affairs.
Despite all the sex and gross-out humour in the cartoons they and their readers are very much intellectuals and very, very (very) much not nazis, and so I think there’s a basic assumption that readers are smart and cultured enough to recognise irony and sarcasm even in pictorial depictions.
On an intellectual level, I -get- their schtick. I know they are critical and awful towards -everyone-. What they want to get across is that nothing is sacred. Right. Ok.
However, being critical in the same way to different groups doesn’t mean it’s fair or equal. I can step on a frog the same way I can step on an elephant, and that action has massively different results.
DOES THAT MEAN I CONDONE MURDER OR THAT ANYONE HAD IT COMING? FUCK NO.
What if the bear will strike against whoever teased it the most that day, would you want everyone to live their lives in apprehension and fear over this?
And you say this as if the two are mutually exclusive.
You know what? I like to think I’m cultured enough to recognize someone in a cartoon is supposed to be a particular group (say, by their dress) without descent into Giftpilz/Tintin In The Congo-level racist caricature.
FWIW, the guys haven’t been caught and no declarations have been made, so calling the shooters “Jihadist” is jumping the gun.
Also *Charlie *went from being a daring leftwing, revolutionary satirical rag to an old, whiny, racist piece of shit in my lifetime. And while the few genuinely funny guys who remained from the old era got shot, fucking Charb still lives. Ain’t no justice in this world.
No, they use offensive depictions ironically, often to show what they think other people think. Like I said, you need to take the art in the editorial context, which is that of intellectual left-wing anarchists. i.e. as far as you can get from nazism on the political spectrum.
Looking for a good picture to illustrate this post, I found this blog post (in French) which deals with the very subject and compares two magazine covers treating with the same incident in which a Front National candidate called justice minister Christiane Taubira “a monkey.” Charlie Hebdo had an apparently awfully racist drawing of Taubira as a monkey. Minute magazine had a photograph of here and the caption: “Wily like a monkey, Taubira finds her banana.”
The point is that the CH drawing is a caricature of the racist thoughts of the Front National, whereas the second is just a plain racist. It’s hard to tell looking at just this one drawing, but anyone familiar with the paper would place this image in the context of a publication that relentlessly and mercilessly skewers racists and racism.
That being said, I’m not really sure the muslim depictions are all that stereotyped after all. Compare drawings by the same artists:
Just to be clear: We don’t get Charlie Hebdo here in Japan, and it’s been 15+ years since I’ve seen more than a cover, so it’s possible my opinions are dated.
Im a bit troubled by this post. Racist pieces of shit(assuming they are not promoting physical violence) have a right not to be shot. Plus, the justice of any murder should not be evaluated on the respective humour of the victims. Unfunny people have the same right not to be executed as funny people.
