Making a Visual Argument: Cartoons and Stereotypes

A well-known anthropologist claims that if he were dropped into a strange culture and had only an afternoon to figure out the nature of social organization there, he’d ask local people to tell him jokes because jokes ultimately reveal the fault lines in a society; that is, they indirectly indicate where the social divisions are. Jokes frequently treat topics that are taboo or nearly so; thus, they likewise reveal perspectives on controversial issues as understood within a given society. Of course, jokes are a genre of the spoken language while cartoons are their multimodal print equivalent. By combining image and text in some way, cartoons present arguments that critique some aspect of the social order, whether a controversy that has simmered for quite a while or some recent event that was the hot topic of yesterday’s talk shows and Twitter feeds. The arguments cartoons present, often mocking in nature, are profoundly local. A major reason humor, including jokes and cartoons, doesn’t translate well is that the things each society (and subgroups within any given society) considers funny and the topics it considers appropriate to make light of vary widely. As you study the cartoons in this selection, examine each from these perspectives. Is the cartoon concerned with a long-standing controversy or some specific event or situation? What social divisions in American society does the cartoon acknowledge, and what is the basis for those divisions — political affiliation, age, ethnicity, sex or gender, sexual identity, region of birth, or some combination of these? As noted in the introductory note to the chapter, you will also want to consider which common stereotypes you don’t see represented in these cartoons and whether it is because they are too potentially incendiary or explosive to find their way into print in mainstream publications or in textbooks like this one. In other words, what social taboos can’t be violated, at least not in these contexts, when the medium is cartoons? Finally, think about the cultural knowledge required to understand each of these cartoons; as you’ll see, in some cases, that knowledge is quite complex.