Some years ago, my friend, the critic of culture Roland Wulbert, remarked that “New Yorker” covers contained only one joke. I did not know whether this observation was a convention unessential to the genre of the magazine’s cover or whether it was an essential point so that this form of understanding could not be the same thing if it were to include multiple jokes. I have been intrigued with this insight ever since. I want to get right what magazine covers are as forms of expression and what they tell about the message to be conveyed or about the temper of the times, cultural critics looking at the nuances of one or another aspect of culture so as to grasp the nature of reality, of existential life, or else the social ambiance of a time, for those items of culture reveal far more to me, at least, than what is told by survey research or by the not so deep thinkers who opine over the airways.
A good cover story that seemed to fit under the one joke category was the New Yorker cover of the sketchily drawn one that was a takeoff of the famous nurse kissing the sailor on VE Day, this time different and so a single joke, of the cover showing two sailors kissing, and so showing that times had changed. There were other details of interest in the contrast between the cover and the original photo by Eisenstadt, but there was only one joke to make. The same one joke principle applied to a recent New Yorker cover that showed a caveman looking out his entrance but attending to drawing animals and hunters on what looked the size and shape of a tablet, Anachronisms are always funny. I still remember when J. Carol Nash on the radio program “I Love Luigi” retells that George Washington couldn’t get his expectant mother to take a cab to the hospital because it was a holiday. Get it? There was only a single joke with the drawing of the caveman. He didn’t look funny or see different figures outside. Just that single joke, as if that is all it wanted to say, to just make that joke.
The Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers were different from New Yorker covers because they portrayed multiple jokes even if there was a dominating one. So the story of a policeman buying an ice cream soda for a boy running away from home tells the overall joke of the policeman calming down a boy anguished about something or other probably trivial, but also included the boy having with him a small lunch pack, as if that would have been enough to allow him to wander off into the world away from his parents. The main joke was for the policeman to treat seriously what was not really thought through by the boy. Everything could be restored if people were kind to one another. So Rockwell was not doing a joke but a slice of life drawn from Americana about what little boys are like and what kindly policemen are like.Mind that Norman Rockwell was not always all that funny. The little Black girl being accompanied by escorts to integrate a school was not just one point, that of the little girl overshadowed by adults because she needed protection to go to school, but also the supplementary point that those protecting her were burly agents, suggesting that even rough looking characters could be driven by the highest motivation, whatever their rough appearances.
Well, over the years, New Yorker covers have changed. For one thing, many of them are quite political, such as the recent one of the chalk marks around what were the bodies kled at a mass shooting, we readers all familiar with such chalk marks, the single joke that it just takes the chalk marks to let us know people have been killed, it happening over and over again. And there are covers that just show a pretty scene with no political point, no point at all except that it is nice to see spring in New York City. One example is a New Yorker cover of April 18, 2022 which shows what seems to me a familiar Brooklyn street with new cars and brownstone buildings at a street corner with some shops and a fence in the foreground to create even one more space or way of being. This cover is pleasing, even artsy, with its multiple lines and multiple spaces, but no jokes I could tell.
A particularly noteworthy cover that made me focus and ruminate about the Wulbert insight was a recent cover of a drawing of a light skinned and very attractive, very fashionably dressed, eating at a table next to one where there was an attractive and fashionably dressed white woman, both of them in what I took to be a New Orleans or Paris setting. Maybe the point or the joke of that drawing was that a woman of color could be as fashionable and poised as a white woman, but maybe that was dated in that only to people of a certain age such as myself is it still remarkable to notice women of color to be so fashionable, to fit in very well with the haute mode life. Maybe the cover was just of a pleasant spring diversion or pastime that would capture the moment regardless of the ethnic makeup of the persons portrayed, people not noticing or deliberately not noticing that there are mixed casts in movies and musicals when at an earlier time there had been an effort to engage in mixed casting so as to introduce people of color into casts so as to normalize those members. How can you tell if that cover was one or the other? There is no detail in the cover which gives it away. It depends on the cultural context as one that shows the work to be done of social assimilation is to be done or has already been accomplished. Look at other theatrical or cultural productions to see what has been accomplished, to give a sense of when the unconventional has become the conventional. There is the recent film of “Macbeth” where Denzel Washington plays the title role and that is not noteworthy, he having years ago ain “Much Ado About Nothing”, and here noteworthy for him making Macbeth more passive and surprised at what proceeds with him than as is the way Macbeth is usually portrayed, or the fact that Frances Macdermott looks like herself rather than the tall and statuesque figures like Judith Anderson who played Lady Macbeth. Can we only resort to the changing temper of the times by looking at a wide range of examples, as my Victorian literature professor thought, having to read hundreds of novels to get a sense of the victorian temper, or did a few key books by Dickens and Eliot give basis enough for their distinctiveness beca use the details were so clear and different? Wilkie Collins provides a joke in “No Name”where the heroine who marries a man she has to marry even while feeling him repugnant and the joke is that a week later showing her to have either mastered or excluded her husband from the bedroom. Women will win out despite their apparent subjugation as it comes to sexuality. That one novel clinches the deal, but then again you have to uncover that novel in the first place.
Maybe the way to connect culture with social reality is not by assessing the temper of the times which, after all, are so ephemeral that they are difficult to capture excerpt at events so clear cut that some moments are quickly dissolving into another distinctive moment, as may be happening at the moment when many observers are noting that the temper of the times has shifted from when, in Watergate, Republicans wanted to distance themselves from Nixon’s outrages and wished to move on, something successfully accomplished in that Ford nearly won the election over Jimmy Carter, the Republicans not punished for having backed Nixon for so long. Today, republicans are blase about gun control and impeachment hearings and Jan. 6th, which means they don’t have to distance themselves from the past to succeed politically. No need to reaffirm a belief in legitimacy in order to get in the majority. Legitimacy just slides off their back and hearings on Jan. 6th won’t make a difference, however many of the film producers are hired by Congresspeople to motivate the electorate when they make their presentations this Thursday night.
Rather, think about the permanent things, these real structures of social life, to which culture can attest, jokes included. Aristophanes told jokes about how men can’t do without sex while women can withold sex even if it may be pleasureable. The Hebrews had the same take on matters even though they are a humorless bunch. Samson, who the narrator includes to say that Samson is experienced with women, nonetheless gives his power into the control of a woman who goes on to deceive her, whether symbolically or actually when she cuts his hair.That seems a more fateful and accurate reading of the relation of men to women than discussed in politics or opinion polls. We use rhetoric to be tested against literature rather than against science even if for two hundred years we strive to establish a social science not dedicated to mere opinion. Literature and art are not opinions but carefully considered balances of forces that reverberate throughout the ages. There are cliches in literature, to be sure, but what we might consider as the eternal verities of literature seem to hold up rather well, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath tale homing in on what women are and have been and will be like.
But what about politics? It also should not elude the literary verities, provide templates for what actually occurs in politics. Shakespeare's “Julius Caesar” may be one of his wisest creations because it is not about evil or overbearing monarchs and would be monarchs but about Brutus who is compelled in principle to become a traitor to his friend, and so is condemned by Dante along with Judas to the lowest circle of Hell. Rather, Brutus did have his principles, even if they were overshadowed by the deed he did. Similarly, I might ask, what are the principles that guide current Republican Congressional leaders to deny gun control, however it may outrage many of the American people? Where are their principles? They rest, I think, to really be overturning Roe v. Wade as what is right and proper and that the Republicans have for a long time schemed and angled to achieve that, and are doing so soon enough, getting three Supreme Court Justices to make a majority, when the prospect of doing so seemed not so long ago to have been without reach. People can have principles even if you or I don’t like them.This is no joke nor a creation of evil but the laws or the way things are in politics as that is ratified by literature.