Maybe Not   

Many commentators declared an end to the age of irony after September 11. Editorial cartoonists and humorists did take a patriotic break from criticizing the U.S. government. But the lull didn’t last long.

Reports of the death of irony have been greatly exaggerated, to misquote Mark Twain, one of the country's great ironists.

More than six months after the terrorist attacks, it may be hard to remember that many pundits declared September 11 would force a change in the nation's humor.

"This may be an event which historians look back to as the beginning of a new era of sensitivity, introspection and growth," George Schlatter, producer of the 1960s hit "Laugh-In," told the Christian Science Monitor just three weeks after the attack.

Maybe not.

At first the changes were obvious and did appear to signal some sort of profound shift. The New Yorker, for instance, published its September 24 issue, the first after the attacks, without a cartoon. The sole illustration was a George Booth sketch of a weeping woman in a chair. It was only the second time in the magazine's 77-year history that it published without cartoons--the first being August 31, 1946, an issue that featured John Hersey's lengthy opus on Hiroshima. Also, editorial cartoonists, for the most part, abandoned the jibes at President George W. Bush and Congressman Gary Condit and ran "tribute" cartoons, a genre made famous by Bill Mauldin's depiction of a weeping Abraham Lincoln statue at the Lincoln Memorial in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

What was different about September 11--unlike most news events that become fodder for political humor--was that cartoonists and comics were just as horrified and scared by the terrorist attacks as the general public. "I was so shell-shocked, I didn't know what to do," says Drew Sheneman, editorial cartoonist for Newark's Star-Ledger. "I was feeling very patriotic, so there was no pressure to rein it in. In fact, they asked me to do more [cartoons] after 9/11. I usually do five a week, and they asked me to do seven."

But this new era of sensitivity didn't last long. Within a week, some editorial cartoonists dared to break with the national mood of uncritical patriotism. In November, television late-night hosts delivered monologues full of Osama bin Laden and Taliban one-liners, and by February, their political joke count was above the pre-September 11 levels. Not that all Americans were ready for this: The more outspoken cartoonists found themselves besieged by outraged readers. Nonetheless, even in this time of national trauma, cartoonists say, their role is not to reassure readers but, when necessary, to provoke them.

"It's still OK to criticize the government," Sheneman says. "Blind obedience is not a requisite now that this horrible thing has happened."

Now, humor and political criticism are back to their usual levels. But cartoonists say their audiences still appear more sensitive than they were pre-9/11 to any attacks on the president or U.S. policies.

"We published a letter [in April] in which a gentleman expressed 'white anger' at a cartoon," says Steve Benson, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Arizona Republic. The letter was in response to a Benson cartoon about Operation Anaconda captioned "Vietganistan." Benson says he's received many angry letters in his time, but "this is the first time I had a person express absolute outrage. It's clear it doesn't take much to prick the scab.... Some of the initial shock and outrage has tempered over time, but you don't have to probe too deep to find it simmering beneath the surface."

Anger did indeed boil over a few months ago with the publication of a cartoon by freelancer Ted Rall. Almost six months after the attacks, his February 28 "Terror Widows" cartoon prompted a roar of outrage and disgust. The multipaneled cartoon portrays the widows of the attacks as greedy and inane.

In one panel, a widow remarks, "I keep waiting for Kevin to come home, but I know he never will. Fortunately the $3.2 million I collected from the Red Cross keeps me warm at night." In another panel, a representation of the widow of slain journalist Daniel Pearl remarks, "Of course it's a bummer they slashed my husband's throat, but the worst was having to watch the Olympics alone."

The cartoon ran for several days on the New York Times' Web site until an outcry from readers caused it to be pulled. Rall is syndicated in 140 newspapers, but he says he doesn't know how many ran the cartoon.

"I think it hits a nerve because it's so dead-on," Rall says. "I was watching TV, and I saw a parade of professional victims. I'm not talking about those truly grieving, but there were people who were promoting their dead spouses in a cheesy way. I saw them as tacky and gauche people."

Rall says that if he were a staff cartoonist on a newspaper, he would be fired for drawing cartoons like "Terror Widows." But he also says his e-mails were running "four to one" in support of the cartoon.

In March, Rall put out a strip taking aim at another sacred icon of September 11--firefighters. That one, which ran only in the April edition of Gear magazine, depicted a fantasy future of firefighters, still overwhelmed with donations, riding limousines to fires.

Few of Rall's colleagues defend the cartoons, but they do defend his right to draw them.

"I thought the widows cartoon had a point, but it went way overboard," says Joel Pett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist at Kentucky's Lexington Herald-Leader. "But as a friend of mine says, if you don't cross the line occasionally, you forget where it is. Too many of us censor ourselves, and I think it's a far worse sin to self-censor than to cross the line occasionally."

Scott Stantis, cartoonist at Alabama's Birmingham News and president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, was put in the unenviable position of defending Rall's cartoon--which he found "reprehensible"--when appearing on MSNBC's "Alan Keyes Is Making Sense."

Keyes, who called the cartoon "brutal, insensitive, tasteless garbage" on his March 6 show and in an accompanying column that appeared on MSNBC.com, said Rall didn't deserve First Amendment protection.

Rall responded to Keyes with his own weapon: A March cartoon called "Everything Changed After 1-30-33" shows photos of Hitler and swastikas overlaid by Keyes' quotes about the widows strip.

More mildly, the cartoonists association posted a response on its Web site condemning "any kind of press censorship."

"I think we're under particular scrutiny since 9/11," Stantis says. "A number of cartoonists have heard, 'You're a traitor,' anytime they question the president."

The Lexington Herald-Leader's Pett has heard many similar accusations since September 11. He began drawing cartoons critical of U.S. policies less than a week after the attacks. In response, Pett, who is syndicated in about 50 newspapers, received letters from readers who expressed disgust, hatred and even bewilderment.

One accused Pett of "stoop[ing] to a new low of decency and civility."

Pett, like most editorial cartoonists, is no stranger to hate mail. But the post-9/11 response was "particularly vehement and vitriolic," he says. "It was the first time in my career that I haven't looked at the letters from readers [disagreeing with me] and thought, 'OK, we have a difference of opinion.' I wanted to make sure they personally understood that I felt it was not unpatriotic not to go along with the program, but in fact it was our patriotic duty to challenge," says Pett, explaining why he chose to write a column about the issue.

In a September 30 op-ed piece, called "Drawing the Line," Pett wrote, "[A]fter the stricken Uncle Sams and the sobbing Statues of Liberty, after memorializing New York's firefighters and police officers as the Twin Towers of Bravery, after Iwo Jima 2 and the demonizing of terror, then what?

"Then, as the president urged, we, like all Americans, get back to work.... We ask questions about civil liberties, retaliation, racial and ethnic profiling...and we return to employing the various tools of our tirades: irony, humor, ridicule, scorn, skepticism, sarcasm and the rest."

The Arizona Republic's Benson, who is syndicated in 111 newspapers, drew a cartoon that ran September 15 showing a CIA operative with a shadowy plane flying in one ear and out the other. The caption: "U.S. Intelligence."

"I got calls from people saying, 'It's too early,' " he says. "This has been an interesting phenomenon – the question is when and how should we deal with these tragedies. It's a matter of timing, sensitivity and use of image."

Other Benson cartoons critical of U.S. policy and President Bush followed. And so did the hate e-mails: "You should have been in the towers on 9/11," one said. Another was even more succinct: "Do us all a favor and die."

It all reached a head on November 8 with a cartoon called "Dumb Bombs" that showed a smiling George Bush sitting backwards in a fighter plane dropping bombs labeled "Killing Innocent Civilians" and "Starving Millions of Afghans."

That cartoon, Benson says, caused a great deal of angst in Greeley, Colorado, where the Greeley Tribune ultimately ran an apology for printing it. The editors of the St. George Spectrum in Utah also apologized after a group of veterans marched on the newspaper building.

In response, the Logan Herald Journal, also in Utah, ran his cartoon, saying, according to a Benson paraphrase: "If you don't want to read about a variety of opinions, don't read the editorial pages."

"In times of crisis, there's a tendency to act like a group of lemmings and all rush headlong in one direction," Benson says. "The role of the cartoonist is to say, 'Yes...but.' "

For Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and coauthor of "Drawn and Quartered: The History of American Political Cartoons," the problem is not controversial cartoons but boring ones. He says what he has been most struck by in the months following September 11 is that the political cartoons "are less sharp, less biting, less funny than anytime I can think of in recent history.

"I find the group now to be very dull," he says. "They're not necessarily jingoistic like in World War II, but it's almost like they're looking for other things to write about--but no one is thinking about them, so it doesn't resonate. It will be interesting to see if this continues."

Lawrence Mintz, a professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland and head of the Art Gliner Center for Humor Studies, says 9/11 has exacerbated a general drought in good humor that's been going on for the past decade. "I don't think this is a very fertile period for comedy," Mintz says. "I know I'm one of the few who feel that way, but I think we have a tougher, nastier type of humor in general, even pre-September 11.... And the events of September 11 really nailed it home."

Mintz attributes what he sees as the decline of good comedy in general to "a realization of how divided we are and how many people really hate us. It's much easier to laugh at people you hate than laugh at being hated. We can try and turn it back on the Afghans and the Middle East, but we don't hate them as much as they hate us."

Perhaps for that reason, many late-night comics were particularly low-key for weeks after the attacks. The well-publicized exceptions, such as ABC's "Politically Incorrect" host Bill Maher, showed that in the early days, sensitive viewers and sponsors--and the White House--were not receptive to criticism of U.S. policies or the military.

Maher said on his September 17 show that maybe it was the U.S. military, not the terrorists, who were cowardly, by "lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away." He apologized on air a few days later.

The rest of the mainstream late-night shows--CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman," NBC's "The Tonight Show" and NBC's "Late Night with Conan O'Brien"--all remained fairly muted for weeks. It wasn't until November 7 that Letterman referred to the Taliban in his "Top Ten" list (Top Ten Things That Will Get You Thrown Out of the Taliban--No. 1, "Mailing Anthrax without proper postage").

By February, five months after the attacks, things were back to normal. The Center for Media and Public Affairs, in an analysis of the humor content of late-night television, found that political jokes by late-night comics dropped by 54 percent in the month following September 11, but in February they were up 38 percent from their pre-September 11 averages. In other words, before the attacks, an average of 6.8 political jokes were told per night on the three late-night shows combined. After the attacks, it dropped to slightly more than three jokes a night. By February, it was up to nine jokes.

"It seems the time that elapses between catastrophes and comic takes on them grows shorter and shorter," Steve O'Donnell, a New York-based writer who has worked for Letterman and Chris Rock, told the Los Angeles Times. "It took almost 100 years for jokes to emerge about Lincoln's assassination...and less than a decade about John F. Kennedy's assassination."

With September 11, it took less than six months. And not all who attempted to use jokes to address the enormity of the attacks were condemned. The satirical newspaper the Onion ran an issue solely focused on the terrorist actions on September 26, after taking a one-week break.

"The decree came down from the editors at our Monday meeting to do an issue entirely devoted to the terrorist attacks," says Joe Garden, an Onion staff writer. Garden says he thought it was "the wrong thing to do. I thought people would not be ready."

To complicate matters, the Onion, which is distributed in Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago and Boulder and has a broad online audience, planned to launch a New York edition on September 26. "I thought it would be suicidal to do it in our first New York edition," Garden says.

The New York version was delayed a few weeks. But the September 26 issue did carry humorous stories focused on the attacks, with headlines such as "Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell" and "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule." The Onion received some angry responses, including a fax that simply said over and over, "Not funny, not funny, not funny," Garden says. But "otherwise, it was an overwhelmingly positive response."

September 11 "didn't kill our sense of irony, it just impaired it awhile," he says. "It was a temporary setback for irony. After all, humor is just another mechanism for processing information.... I don't think anything's off-limits except jokes that aren't funny."

The New Yorker's cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, says that, in fact, in the months after September 11, humor became "hyper-ironic."

"With the Office of Homeland Security and all the color codes [of the security alerts], it became something you couldn't help but make fun of," Mankoff says. "You have an Office of Homeland Security to make us think we have security and in reality we don't know what we're doing--now that's ironic."

Joseph Boskin, a professor of American social history at Boston University, says that September 11 was not the first time people anxiously asked whether American humor could withstand such tragic times. "It was raised in the 1950s with [the threat of] thermonuclear warfare and the advent of the Cuban missile crisis," he says.

But, like 50 years ago, he notes, comedy survived intact, "particularly retaliatory humor, which plays a very important part in American humor."

For example, the first joke Boskin heard after September 11 described how Osama bin Laden should be punished--captured, sent to the United States, given a sex change operation, and then sent back to live as a woman under the Taliban.

But while post-September 11 humor looks an awful lot like pre-September 11 humor, not everything is the same.

Mike Luckovich, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, says that as a sign of respect, he has shrunk Bush's ears a little. "Before 9/11 he had a really small head and ears like an Easter bunny," he says. But Luckovich's sentiments about the president changed. "For the first time I wanted Bush to succeed. Part of it was his behavior and part of it was a feeling that 'we're all in this together'--he's not just the president of rich people."

So now Luckovich's rendering of Bush is less exaggerated, less comical. "I still want to skewer him in cartoons," he says, "but I think he deserves to have a little smaller ears."