The OJ one bothers me. It’s out of character for the cartoonist, who’s supposed to be incredibly right wing. How many people on the far right think that OJ was innocent? That one just struck a false note for me. The others, though, are fucking brilliant.
My entire family died in a conceptual metajoke, you bastard.
Actually, the November 1st cartoon is kinda positive.
And the October 18th one is hilarious.
Actually, I read the Onion in print (never occurs to me to visit the website), and the political cartoon is embedded near the back section, with the puzzles, ads, and past the large media and food section (both non-satirical). Virtually all the satirical stuff (even the horoscope) is in the front (except for the occasional sports feature on the back page), so I often wondered myself whether they were simply giving air to an unfunny, more reactionary voice (though I’ll admit to not paying as much attention to the comic before as I did in going through the links mentioned above). Also, they usually have a couple other “straight” comics (that seem to be locally syndicated) in the same area, so I always assumed the same applied here.
I like the running gag that every cartoon seems to depict either the Grim Reaper or the Statue of Liberty (which reminds me of the running gag in Our Dumb Century of political cartoons depicting the Threat of the Moment looming ominously next to Lady Liberty).
“Looming ominously?” As I recall, it was usually raping her vigorously.
Let me add my voice to the people who find these cartoons fantasticly wonderful, albeit in a highly ironic way. The key is to read a couple dozen of them in a row - the hilarity just builds and builds until the laughter is uncontrollable (for me, anyway). I particularly love how the Statue of Liberty weeps even for things that aren’t supposed to be taken as tragic.
Well, if it isn’t satire, then what do we call its portrayal of police work, realistic? You think bombs routinely get planted in the toilets of police officers (in LW II, I think), a cop would handcuff himself to a potential suicide and then jump off a building with him, and that dozens of officers would stand around while one officer engaged in a fistfight with a suspect before arresting him, with no repercussions whatever? As Ebert says:
I think it’s faintly weird that you would want a cite backing up an opinion from a movie review. You are aware that all art is subjective? If you want to take the Lethal Weapon movies seriously, by all means, that’s your business. But “LW” has about as much in common with the actual workings of the LAPD as “Star Wars” does with NASA.
Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean that “Star Wars” is a parody of NASA, does it? Just because something isn’t serious doesn’t make it a satire. Satire usually shows some derision for its object (indeed, that’s part of the definition). I did not get the impression that Lethal Weapon was trying to highlight police brutality or ineptitude (a la Reno 911). Rather, it was using the action movie as a tool for humor.
Daniel
Yeah, that one had me flummoxed as well. I think he decided to lay off the ideology for a week and go with “general cluelessness”, but it doesn’t quite work. Even so, the Statue of Liberty holding up a foam finger is pretty good.
That one made me laugh, so it wasn’t a very high form of humor.
The example was meant to show they had nothing in common. The point Ebert was making, that I am agreeing with, is that the Lethal Weapon movies are satirical because they go to such extremes. This is why he mentioned Dirty Harry, which was definitely not meant to be satirical, but reflected an actual worldview that people took seriously. Lethal Weapon depicts the logical endpoint of that worldview. What it is satirizing is the idea of police officers as lone crusaders who take on bad guys by shooting or blowing up everything in sight, and then have a few beers. It mocks the simplistic solutions to complex societal problems the Dirty Harry movies championed. (Okay, maybe nobody engaged in the making of LW took it that seriously, but it makes sense.)
Parody and satire are not the same thing–a parody is intentionally humorous in a deliberate way, while a satire may not necessarily be that funny at all. One way to define satire is the use of ridicule, and the things are listed in my last post from the LW movies are certainly ridiculous. “Reno 911” however, is closer to a true parody.