Word: yorkerism
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...have an opinion on the New Yorker cartoon...
...over the day itself that it has taken over our verbs, too--yellowness has conquered our agency." It's like Woolf landed a 1080° at the X Games. (Wood knows how to boo, too, and he singles out one book in particular: Terrorist, by his colleague at the New Yorker, John Updike. You can picture Updike raising one of his long, feathery, white eyebrows in response...
...most glaring recent example was the New Yorker cover that satirized the smears against Barack Obama and his wife. In a Dagwood sandwich of stereotypes, cartoonist Barry Blitt drew Barack (dressed in a turban) and Michelle (with an Angela Davis 'fro and an AK-47) exchanging a fist bump in the White House while a portrait of Osama bin Laden looks on and an American flag burns in the fireplace...
Comedy, good comedy, is not just unsafe; it's uncontrollable--satire most of all. Satire takes a real position and exaggerates it to the point of absurdity. By nature, it is, if it is any good, subject to interpretation. The knock on the New Yorker cover was like the old critique of Archie Bunker: that some idiot bigot somewhere might take it literally and enjoy...
This is why true believers suspect satirists, even those--as for liberals upset with the New Yorker--in their own camp. Satirists don't make crystal clear how you're supposed to read their work. They don't give you a road map to correct thinking, because a joke explained is neither funny nor persuasive. They give voice to the enemy's beliefs. And this makes it easy to call them traitors...