While I wouldn’t be surprised to see Hart making anti-Islamic statements in his cartoons, I’m beginning to believe his intentions weren’t malicious this time.
While I accept that not only is the cartoon not funny, given the non-offensive interpretation it does not even contain a joke, I would be unwilling to accept the anti-Islam interpretation simply because it’s the only other presented option.
And let’s remember, Hart isn’t shy about expressing his beliefs. Take a look at the Washington Post article mentioned in this thread. I think if he’d made a strip saying that Islam stunk, he’d come right out and say it. Why would he tell a journalist that gays are going to hell etc. but then try to deny to another journalist that he drew an anti-Islam cartoon? It doesn’t make sense.
Much as I hate it, I’m going to have side with Johnny Hart this time (although I find the anti-intellectualism displayed by Airman Doors in this thread to be mind-blowingly idiotic).
** It didn’t have cresent moons: it had images of jellyfish. Presumably one was a picture of a male jellyfish, and the other of a female, but they were indistinguishable to human perception.
While I think B.C. is a stupid cartoon, and I strongly dislike Hart’s constant placing of religious messages, religions aren’t automatically immune to criticism. The complainers have a right to pressure the newspapers, but they’re wrong to do so.
That is so an attack on Islam. The “I” is made up of the gap between the frames on which the word “SLAM” is written. Then there’s the crescent moon. Fuck’s sake - I can’t believe anyone’s disputing it.
Andy is, as usual, a colossal prick who enjoys following me around and lying about me. He wears out my pagedown finger.
ArchiveGuy makes a good case for this actually being an unfunny comic. His explanation doesn’t account for the nighttime aspect to the comic, but it accounts for the rest of it. I am waffling bigtime on how this should be interpreted.
Shodan makes an invalid point. IF this is an anti-Islam comic, we’re not looking at one with a subtle metaphor crafted by a genius; we’re looking at a metaphor so clumsily crafted that most people don’t see it until it’s pointed out to them. Bad writing doesn’t equal subtle writing unless you’re in your college’s postmodernism department.
A fool can try to be subtle and clever, and usually ends up being incoherent and opaque. If the anti-religious interpretation is correct, Hart has managed incoherence and opacity.
But I reiterate: I find the simpler explanation to be barely plausible. I still lean toward its being anti-Islam, but not strongly enough to condemn Hart for it.
Then why were his previous, overtly religious comics so obvious? This one certainly isn’t. No one seems to get the supposed anti-Islam message until it is pointed out to them by the offenderati.
Precisely. He doesn’t seem to have backed off from any of his previous controversial positions, and certainly not from any previous cartoon. But here he denies any anti-Islamic defense.
This is similar to pointing out that the word “niggardly” is not an ethnic slur. It takes a pretty strong determination to take offense to ignore this and declare that you know better than Hart what he meant.
Regardless of the intent of the cartoon, it’s an indicator that it’s time for Hart to quit writing a syndicated cartoon.
Either it’s an attack on Islam (which is certainly possible, given Hart’s previous offensive behavior on behalf of his brand of Christian evangelism), or it’s a truly lame joke indicative of just how far his standards have fallen (believe it or not, B.C. used to be clever.
How nice that the guy who did the “What Would Muhammed Drive?” cartoon got threats of death and mutilation. That’ll teach him to cast aspersions on peaceful, law-abiding zealots!
Shodan, the point is that he HAS backed off of other religious slurs – he has the gall to claim that the menorah-into-crucifix cartoon honors Judaism! That is so transparently false that it makes his denials in this case meaningless, as far as I am concerned.
You ask why his previous ones were so obvious: I don’t see a parallel. IF this one is anti-islam, it’s clumsily done. The previous one with the menorah was also clumsily done, inasmuch as menorahs don’t come out in the Spring (unless I’m drastically mistaken) and isn’t a symbol comparable to the crucifix. The non-obvious nature of this comic could easily be explained by Hart’s incompetence at communicating his message, or by his demonstrated willingness to dissemble about what he’s doing. For all we know, he’s feeling super-clever for drawing an anti-Islam cartoon with plausible deniability built in.
Not that I’m claiming that’s what he did – simply that the non-obvious nature of the supposed metaphor isn’t a disproof.
No, he hasn’t - not in the sense of “my cartoon had nothing to do with the subject you think it did”, which would be necessary in this case.
Hart didn’t claim his menorah cartoon had nothing to do with Judaism at all. He has claimed his outhouse cartoon had nothing to do with Islam at all.
It is just like the offense at the word “niggardly”. An accurate interpretation of the term “niggardly” has nothing to do with racism at all. Same here - Hart has stated that an accurate interpretation of his cartoon has nothing to do with Islam at all. People who are taking offense at the cartoon are projecting their own insecurities onto circumstances not having to do with offensive language at all.
No, but Easter does come out in the spring. And Hart never denied that his cartoon had to do with Judaism and Easter. He has denied that this cartoon has to do with Islam.
Which is what I find so surprising. Why was he so competent in the menorah cartoon, about which there was never any doubt that it was about religion (and he never denied that it was so), and yet so incompetent in this one?
Hart never “dissembled” about the meaning of his cartoons before. I suppose you could take offense at his message in the menorah cartoon, but there was never any doubt what the message was meant to be. Here we have an alleged message, that hardly anyone else sees (unless prompted), and which is specifically denied by the artist, who has a record of being completely up front about attitudes and cartoons, even when they are offensive.
Why would he be straightforward regarding his attitudes towards Judaism, homosexuality, and everything else, and coy only about Islam?
You will have to forgive me for pointing out where the burden of proof lies.
Some seem to be alleging that this is an anti-Islamic cartoon. The person responsible for creating the cartoon denies that it is so. The supposed anti-Islamic message is (to say the least) difficult either to discern, or to understand. The artist has always been quite clear about what he was trying to convey in previous controversies.
The idea that this is anti-Islamic because you slam a door and have a crescent moon on outhouses is exactly the same as pointing out that “niggardly” sounds a lot like “n*gger”. The trouble is, that this is a etymological coincidence. So is the crescent moon on an outhouse, and failed potty jokes.
Pretending to see dark and secret thoughts in the funny papers - that just looks paranoid.
Well, the anti-Islamic interpretation is a lot funnier (in a nasty way) than the innocent one. It’s a better joke.
That’s a good point. I gotta confess I can’t find any cartoons with such a dense use of metaphor. However, chances are that Hart hasn’t said anything this objectionable before and so probably hasn’t had any need to make use of such tactics.
Unless Hart is prone to spontaneously channeling the spirit of Gertrude Stein it’s pretty obvious that his cartoons have at least some meaning. Many are dumb and shitty but there is always something there, be it a lame joke or trite moral sentiment.
Either Hart was trying to convey some meaning with this cartoon or he was engaging in some Derridean postmodern experiment. Which is more likely?
Once we’ve ascertained that there is indeed some meaning to his cartoons we’re back to where we were yesterday, trying to decide which of two interpretations is the most likely.
Finagle
Well, that can be explained by taking into account the fact that I’m an asshole. At the moment I’m an asshole who’s convinced that he’s right. Of course I’m going to come across as unpleasantly arrogant
That’s contradictory. If the cartoon is a metaphorical slam against Islam then it follows that Hart would be less than willing to own up to its true meaning for fear of going the same way as Ann Coulter from the National Review after that unfortunate post 9/11 article wherein she advocated the forced conversion to Christianity of all Muslims everywhere. People tend to get fired for viciously attacking Islam whether behind the flimsy veil of a sophomoric metaphor or not.
To put it another way, while ordinarily the authors interpretation of his own work should be the final word in debates about its meaning, when the author has a strong vested interest (in this case his job) in playing the innocent his words shouldn’t be given as much weight. To me, Hart’s explanation rings as hollow as his simpering pseudo-justification for his infamous Menorah cartoon.
This is sheer conjecture. Five of the six cartoonists agreed that the cartoon was meant as an attack on Islam even after hearing Hart’s explanation. One went as far as to say **“There’s no explanation for that gag without Islam. It’s meaningless.” **
Not much equivocation there and you have no basis for suggesting that there was.
I did actually miss the posts. The reason was that I started writing the post you quoted but lost track of time. Then some friends came round to watch a dvd so there’s actually a gap of several hours between my starting of the post and its actual posting. I should have refreshed the page. My bad.
Having said that, I think that the explanation offered in those posts is so weak, so blinkered and so desperate that there’s really no point in drawing a distinction between them. What, really, is the qualitative difference between “Outhouses stink” and “Oh, I never noticed how much this outhouse stinks” or even “I’m so stinky that I can’t tell which smells worse, the outhouse or me”.
In fact, I’d argue against the third interpretation because Hart makes no attempt to identify the man as smelly before he enters the outhouse when some stink lines in frame one could have easily accomplished this and removed all ambiguity.
And, of course, the suggestion that he’s making a veiled bigoted attack based on a common idiom, in spite of the fact that it’s the most sensible interpretation of the cartoon*(according to five professional cartoonists and one professor of semiology who’s opinions do have relevance no matter how strenuously you dismiss them)*, makes sense of every single aspect of the text (as opposed to your explanation which requires we dismiss several of its elements as coincidental - the nighttime setting for example) and was written by a Fundamentalist Christian cartoonist who has actual historical precedent of slamming other religions (albeit not this cryptically) is completely beyond the pale.
:rolleyes:
Shodan
Why do you assume that they’re so determined to take offence? The Washington Post article I linked to states that the cartoonists were all admirers of Hart’s work. You would’ve thought they’d be sticking up for him.
Hell, I have no vested interest in this. There are very few things in this world that I care less about than some non entity’s opinions of Islam. I came to the conclusion I did from a wholly objective standpoint, after weighing the explanations from both sides. I then went away and did a little web searching and found out that Mr Hart is no stranger to the world of controversy and is in fact a bit of a stirrer. This cemented it as far as I was concerned. The only reason I’m still posting in this thread is because some people (IMO) are being wilfully stubborn and refusing to even acknowledge the possibility that this cartoon could have a darker meaning.
Besides, it’s not as though it would take a genius to make the connection between the crescent moons of Islam and the crescent moon designs commonly seen on outhouse doors and see the implications for a joke. All it would take is a grudge against Islam. Since Hart is known to have such a grudge (see my post on the first page - Johnny Hart: “Jews and Muslims who don’t accept Jesus will burn in hell”) it doesn’t seem all that unlikely that he noticed the implications himself.
You make it sound like Hart proved the Riemann Zeta hypothesis instead of knocking together a silly, sophomoric metaphor to cloak a bigoted attack on Islam. Besides as Left Hand of Dorkness pointed out, the fact that people didn’t get it meant that Hart botched the metaphors construction, not that it was particularly sophisticated.
