What is the point of a cartoon? The dictionary definition is an obvious place to start: “A simple drawing showing the features of its subjects in a humorously exaggerated way.”
The Guardian has got into a(nother) pickle over a cartoonist. A few months ago they completely mismanaged a situation where one of their cartoonists, Martin Rowson, was accused of using anti-Semitic tropes. Now it would appear that their other big beast cartoonist, Steve Bell, has been accused of the same.
The Guardian has got into a(nother) pickle over a cartoonist
Rowson had drawn the Jewish BBC chairman Richard Sharp holding a box with Goldman Sachs (where he once worked) written on it, but partly obscured, so it only read Gold Sack. In the box was a squid. Sharp’s features were exaggerated. Dots were joined between his Jewishness, the word gold and an apparent pile of coins in the box. Anti-Semitic tropes without doubt. Rowson says this was inadvertent.
Steve Bell drew a cartoon last week that was pulled from the Guardian, but he posted online. It depicted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu with his shirt open, holding a scalpel over a dotted shape of Gaza on his stomach. His signature ended “after David Levine”. That was a reference to a cartoon from 1966 showing former US president Lyndon Johnson in the same position with a map of Vietnam on his stomach.
However, there is of course the arguably anti-Semitic Shylock “pound of flesh” line in Shakespeare.
Were both these examples anti-Semitic? The Guardian would appear to believe so. Bell says he has effectively been sacked.
Back to the dictionary. What is “exaggeration”? And how far does it go before someone takes offence? Offending those in power is one of the main jobs of a cartoonist. But here we come to the conundrum of intended exaggeration (and hence offence taken) and unintentional. The Guardian brought this latest row on itself. Their cartoons having a go at Hamas are few and far between. Had they been more even-handed then the sense of offence would cool sooner.
Christian Adams is the Evening Standard’s cartoonist
