A lot of people have been asking me lately: “Hey, Dinsmore! What do you think about this whole Obama New Yorker cover?” (Full disclosure: no one has asked me this question.)

Well, here’s my take on it. The New Yorker, of course, has the right to print any damn cover they please, and I would disagree that it’s either tasteless or offensive, as both of our presidential candidates have proclaimed. (Note: I would highly doubt that Obama actually felt offended and I can guarantee that McCain didn’t). If they painted Obama with a bone through his nose, dancing around a cauldron full of steaming babies, that I might agree is offensive, because that would reflect negatively on an entire race of people. This cover doesn’t play on racial stereotypes (unless somehow I missed the new stereotype that African-Americans are Muslim terrorists), it plays on the identity of the candidate himself, which is fair game for political cartoonists.

The question for me isn’t whether it’s offensive … the question is whether it’s funny, and that’s where I raise my objections. In order to be funny, a cartoon must have context. Now, as a right-wing cartoon, this is perfectly good satire. The message it sends is “ha-ha, Obama’s going to come into the White House and terrorize our country with his wicked, anti-American beliefs.” But dig this: the only thing about the cartoon that tell us it is poking fun at this attitude is the fact that it’s on the cover of New Yorker. This tells me that the New Yorker has such a high opinion of itself, it assumes everyone everywhere already knows its political viewpoints.

And that’s the part that offends me. That the editors of the New Yorker (and, to some extent, New Yorkers themselves) believe themselves to be so important that the only audience worth speaking to is the insular crowd that already understands their in-jokes. If you don’t get the joke, then you’re not cool enough to understand both the political context of the Obama-Muslim rumors and the meta-context that the New Yorker would never actually believe this. It is too complicated. And if you have to dig through that many levels to get to the heart of the joke, then the joke is not funny. As a learned scholar on humor, this is my decision, and it is final.

This is a lesson I had to learn the hard way. As I’ve mentioned before on my blog, I made a joke at my wedding that silenced the crowd. Sarah and I went up to thank everyone at the reception. I grabbed the microphone and said, “I’d like to thank you all for helping me to finally realize my dreams of starting my own baby factory.” Now, I will go to my grave thinking this was a pretty funny joke — and that a man who has just spent $30,000 dollars on a party has the right to make any joke he wants and receive at least feigned laughter in response. But it is only funny if you know me and know that I would never actually mean it. And a wedding, I learned, is not the best environment for irony. A gay wedding, maybe. Two men making that exact same joke at their wedding? It would kill. If I have any gay readers who are planning to get married soon, please, give it a spin and let me know how the crowd responds.

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