Wednesday, October 06, 2004
(8:26 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
An Open Letter to The New Yorker
To whom it may concern,In your latest issue, you have included a comic entitled "Vegan Insomnia," which features a line of tofu cubes jumping over a fence. I assume that this is meant to refer to the cliche of people "counting sheep" to fall asleep; in most commercial animations that feature this trope, said sheep are pictured jumping over a fence.
My questions regarding this comic are as follows. First, I have never known tofu to jump over fences. I understand that your artists sometimes push beyond the boundaries of strict realism in an attempt to elicit a "chuckle," but in this case, perhaps your editorial indulgence went too far. Cube of tofu have no arms or legs or any faculty that would allow them to jump. Second, if your artist was attempting to provide a "vegetarian replacement" for sheep, I daresay he was missing the point. The sheep in the "counting sheep" exercise are all alive and well -- the meat of sheep is not a terribly common food, even among your upscale New York audience, and in any case, there is no indication in most depictions of "counting sheep" that the sheep are destined for the slaughterhouse. In point of fact, they are jumping over the fence and thus implicitly escaping from human domination.
All this is to suggest that perhaps the "vegan" version of the sheep-counting cliche would be the same as the "carnivore's" version, except that perhaps the vegan would count the sheep faster in order to get them to freedom more expeditiously. Of course, such an idea would be difficult to express in a one-panel comic, and more importantly, it wouldn't be funny -- but then, I would argue, neither is your existing comic, so it would be no loss.
Sincerely,
Adam Kotsko
