What Are We Laughing At?

• Jordan Laney and Lucinda Garthwaite

Note: ILI Director Lucinda Garthwaite and Senior Associate Jordan Laney talk once a week. Our conversations seesaw between the day-to-day work of the ILI, and thinking over something that's happened in the world, or something that one of us has read, heard or seen. Last week, we shared a reaction to an editorial cartoon circulating on social media. Our shared reaction gave us the idea to do something different in this issue of Intersections, leaning into our mission to think and learn together; We co-wrote this post, and it ends with questions. We’ve opened comments on the ILI website and Facebook page, and we hope you who are reading this will take a moment to comment. We will take up your thoughts, keep thinking and writing, and report back here in the new year.
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Last week, a cartoon by Atlanta-Journal Constitution Editorial Cartoonist Mike Luckovitch showed up several times on our social media feeds. It’s dated, as it turns out; Luckovitch first posted it in 2019. It makes sense that it resurfaced last week, though, in the wake of two high profile murder trials in the U.S., for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged through a Georgia neighborhood, and of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber at an anti-racism protest in Michigan.

The cartoon features a man with a gun slung over each shoulder, and a round of ammunition crossing his chest. Around him, eight other people go about their business. The cartoon caption has the man in the middle saying “I feel threatened.”

The people the man in the middle feels threatened by represent a diverse lot in terms of race, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The man in the middle is apparently white, heavier and less distinctly dressed than those around him, and judging by his red ball cap, a supporter of former US president Donald Trump. The people who shared this on our social media feeds thought it was funny.

Lucinda here: To be honest; it made me mad (self-righteousness alert!) I said that to Jordan, “What good does it do to stereotype white men like this? How does it advance liberatory change?” Jordan gently sharpened my vision. “Rural white men,” she said, “these are my relatives, the guys I grew up with.”

That's one of the differing perspectives that make our conversations so rich: We both live, right now, in rural communities, but Lucinda grew up in a liberal family in suburban New Jersey. Jordan grew up in central Appalachia, in an extended, largely conservative family.

Our core reaction to the cartoon, though, was the same. It seemed to us an invitation to stereotype, create and isolate a whole demographic group as “other”, and then to make fun of them.

We both see the joke, but it’s hard to laugh at it. Jordan thought of the cartoon at meals this past weekend with her family in rural North Carolina, and in the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky. The region of Appalachia, both real and imagined, was created as an “other” America during the Reconstruction era. The hillbilly stereotype that emerged as a result has remained unchanged, and continues to drive deep and systemic harms.

Many argue that the Appalachian region was created through a series of stories, often referred to as local color fiction, and dependent on establishing a rural/urban dichotomy. These were exaggerated stories shared with Northern audiences and industrialists about a place “backward” and beautiful, full of “yesterday’s people” too ignorant to understand the economic potential of the land they occupied, and at the same time worthy of help due to a “racial innocence” and perceived distance from the Civil War.

Those stories, and this cartoon, and the memes mocking US President Joe Biden’s age that Jordan witnessed being passed around her family’s dinner table, seem to us to serve the same purpose: they identify and mock one group in order to distinguish the audience as different and, importantly, better. They allow the audience to establish their identity in opposition to what one is not.

They also almost always play on fear. The man in the middle of the Luckovitch cartoon is saying “I feel threatened.” The audience is meant to mock that emotion (Threatened? Really? By these people just going about their business?) and ascribe the fear to bigotry (clearly all gun-owning, republican-voting white men carry an irrational fear and hatred of people of color/queer folks/anyone not-christian).

Political humor, including editorial cartooning, has a long history, and a record of contributing to social change; Mike Luckovitch has twice been awarded a Pulitzer prize. Caricature has long provided much needed laughs. In our view, the value of both art forms is inarguable.

We’re just as convinced, though, of the necessity of reexamining long-held avenues for social change in light of emerging insights and synthesis of old wisdom with current reality. That's what we do at the ILI.

So, some questions.

- Does it make sense to use the same tactic -- separating, othering, mocking -- in the interest of liberatory change as has been used historically to limit and oppress?

-What's the place of humor in movements for liberation, including mocking humor?

- What is it about this kind of humor and art that resonates with so many? (including the two of us; remember, we got the joke).

-Might it be useful, in terms of liberatory change, to think about ourselves and each other beyond social identity, and “othering”, altogether?

-Is there a place/reason, in the interest of Liberatory change, for not taking things so seriously?

- Maybe it's okay if liberatory change isn't the point; Is there credibility in "C'mon, lighten up!"?

It's time to get this posted, so we had to stop asking questions.

Thank you for joining us.