Speaking of humor, Barack Obama's supporters are showing a distinct lack of it in response to The New Yorker's cover, featuring a cartoon that depicts a turban-clad Obama fist-bumping his wife, Michelle, who wears an afro, cammies and a machine gun, making her look like a 1960s black-power radical. The pair appear to be in the Oval Office, where an American flag burns in the fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden hangs on the wall. It's a wicked satire of Obama's Islamophobia.
"The response from both Democrats and Republicans was explosive," reports the New York Times. Professional humorists have either had difficulty coming up with Obama jokes or found that they were poorly received:
There has been little humor about Mr. Obama: about his age, his speaking ability, his intelligence, his family, his physique. And within a late-night landscape dominated by white hosts, white writers, and overwhelmingly white audiences, there has been almost none about his race.
"We're doing jokes about people in his orbit, not really about him," said Mike Sweeney, the head writer for [Conan] O'Brien on "Late Night." . . .
When [Jon] Stewart on "The Daily Show" recently tried to joke about Mr. Obama changing his position on campaign financing, for instance, he met with such obvious resistance from the audience, he said, "You know, you're allowed to laugh at him." Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview on Monday, "People have a tendency to react as far as their ideology allows them."
Salon's Gary Kamiya blames George W. Bush:
Vast swaths of the left have apparently been so traumatized by the Big Lie techniques employed by the Bush administration, its media lickspittles like Fox News, and the right-wing attack machine that they have come to regard all images or texts that contain negative stereotypes as too politically dangerous to run. If you satirically depict Obama as an Islamist terrorist, in this view, you are only reinforcing and giving broader currency to right-wing smears.
The Los Angeles Times reports on Obama backers upset about the cartoon:
Chicago Tribune columnist/blogger Eric Zorn gave notice that he is waiting for the magazine to launch an equal-ink takedown depicting John McCain as "about 150 years old and spouting demented non-sequiturs in the middle of a violent temper tantrum while, in the corner, his wife is passed out next to a bottle of pills."
Actually, someone who has maintained a little more perspective already obliged. David Horsey, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, riffed on the Blitt illustration with a McCain portrait of his own.
Horsey's image shows a drooling, wheelchair-bound McCain, singing "Bomb bomb bomb--bomb bomb Iran," as wife Cindy pours dozens of pills from a vial and implores her husband, "Take some of my meds to get through the inaugural parade!"
The Horsey cartoon appears here. As far as we know, it has upset no one.
So: A cartoon of Obama inspires fury and outrage. A cartoon of McCain leads everyone to shrug. Obama is being treated like Muhammad, McCain like Jesus.