Wednesday, December 13, 2006
(9:04 AM) | F. Winston Codpiece III:
Perhaps the best New Yorker cartoon ever
Turn with me, if you will, to pg. 58 of the December 18, 2006, issue of The New Yorker. For those who do not have a copy on hand, I will set the scene for you. People are standing in line at airport security. In order to enter an area known only as "Concourse E," they must first go through an oversized wringer, the type used for laundry by our primitive ancestors. The image shows a man in the middle of going through this wringer, apparently looking at the guard as if to ask, "Are you done yet?"Let me explain why this is funny. As many of you know, the English language has a rich repertoire of set idiomatic expressions or "clichés." One of the best is "being put through the wringer," which refers to enduring a very difficult situation -- such as, for example, the rigors of airport security in our Age of Constant Fear. The center of this cartoon's comedic effect is what amounts to a pun: "What if you literally had to be 'put through the wringer'?" But the true twist isn't so much the visual gag as the biting social commentary for which New Yorker cartoons are famous -- after the initial shock of seeing a human being treated as laundry, we note that our fellow Americans are still showing the same Stoical endurance that has characterized their response to previous security measures. One is left gazing into the distance, pondering the razor's-edge that separates a healthy detachment from complicity with torture.
This isn't just a throw-away gag. This is art in the truest and deepest sense of the word.
