The New Yorker: Unfunny Since 1925

The New Yorker magazine is probably best known for its cartoons which never seem to make any sense and are rarely funny ... kind of like TheCoolerKing*.

Their latest cover, in an attempt for humor or satire or relevance or attention, portrays Barack and Michelle Obama in an illustration featuring "fantastical images" that left the Obama camp fantastically offended.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44831000/jpg/_44831351_cartoon_ap226b.jpg

The image, drawn by Barry Blitt and featured on the front cover of this week's New Yorker, shows Mr Obama wearing traditional Muslim dress, while his wife, Michelle, is dressed in combat trousers and carrying a machine-gun.

The couple are shown standing in the Oval Office, greeting one another with a "fist bump", with an American flag burning in the fireplace, and a portrait of Osama Bin Laden on the wall.
I'm sure it seemed like a great idea at the time, but in today's politically correct society they had to have expected the fallout.

The New Yorker said the cover, called "The Politics of Fear", was a critique of unfounded allegations that have tried to portray Mr Obama, a Christian, as a closet radical Muslim.

"The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall? All of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that's the spirit of this cover," the statement said.

The portrayal of the Obamas "fist-bumping" one another was a reference to a campaign rally in St Paul, Minnesota, back in June, at which the couple were seen to "fist-bump", an action described by one Fox News commentator as a "terrorist fist-jab".

[...]

But Obama spokesman Bill Burton dismissed the cartoon, saying: ""The New Yorker may think... that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create, but most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."
Of course, it's obviously satirical to anyone with a brain in their head, but remember that we're talking about America here ... a country whose current president wouldn't know satire from a ham sandwich.

How many people are going to totally miss the true point of the cartoon and only see what is portrayed within? For how many people (West Virginia, I'm looking at you!) is this going to be a confirmation of all of their fears rather that an attempt to mock them?

Most importantly, how many copies above current circulation is this thing going to sell before the inevitable apology and removal?

Get it fresh from the newsstands, folks, and stash it away for a couple of years when it'll probably fetch a pretty penny on eBay.


*That was crispy's attempt at satire.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/news/politics/23232/