What are the rules for making fun of politicians?

Did you know cartoonists were on Nixon's enemies list? Or that LBJ prevented a cartoonist from getting a medal when he made a cartoon against the Vietnam War? Today we talk about the history of editorial cartoons and political satire, from "Join or Die" to the Obama fist bump, from Thomas Nast to Jimmy Kimmel. Our guide is New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro, author of And to Think We Started as a Book Club. To see the illustrations we discuss in the episode, click here. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Borders on being prejudicial religiously. I don't see the satire in it. I don't think that the rest of the country that looks at it will see any sort of satire. And I don't think there's anything funny about it at all.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  John Heilmann, your thoughts on your rival magazine? I think it's brilliant. And it's right down the middle of the plate for the New Yorker's audience. I think everybody who looks at that magazine and reads it understands that it is, in fact, satire. I think the only way in which these kind of cartoons work is when they play to an existing perception that's out there in the world. And that is, in fact, as The New Yorker has been arguing all day long, that's what they're making fun of.

• 0:34Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.

• 0:36Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 0:38Nick Capodice?

  And today, we are talking about the power of laughter.

• 0:42Speaker 04

  Throughout American history, the long and proud tradition of political cartooning, I mean, the presidents have been explicit targets from the beginning.

• 0:54Hannah McCarthy?

  Is that Tom Toro? Did you talk to Tom?

• 0:57Nick Capodice?

  I did. Everybody, this is Tom Toro.

• 1:00Speaker 04

  I am Tom Toro. I'm a cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine and various other outlets.

• 1:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, Tom is not just any cartoonist. He has a special place in our hearts because he illustrated our book, A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works. And he did such a good job.

• 1:17Nick Capodice?

  He did. And he has a new collection of his New Yorker cartoons out right now called And to Think We Started as a Book Club.

• 1:24Hannah McCarthy?

  What is that title all about? Is that a caption from a cartoon?

• 1:27Nick Capodice?

  It is. It's what a bank robber is saying to the other folks in his crew.

• 1:32Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, Nick, I think you're gonna know what I'm talking about. We're running into a little bit of a problem here.

• 1:38Nick Capodice?

  We are. I am way ahead of you, Hannah. Tom thought about this, too.

• 1:43Speaker 04

  Nothing is more engaging than verbally describing a cartoon to a podcast audience.

• 1:46Hannah McCarthy?

  It's funny.

• 1:47Speaker 04

  It's a pig at a complaint department.

• 1:49Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, and he's saying, "I wish I was taller."

• 1:55Hannah McCarthy?

  See? That's his complaint.

• 1:58Nick Capodice?

  So with the caveat imp toward here, radio not being the most apt medium to explore illustrations, we're gonna do our best.

• 2:08Nick Capodice?

  Politicians have a deep history of despising those who make fun of them, specifically cartoonists. And maybe the most famous of all is a fellow named Thomas Nast. Do you know Thomas Nast?

• 2:22Hannah McCarthy?

  I do. I don't have a framed Harper's Weekly on my wall for nothing. He was a cartoonist in the late 1800s, and he was responsible for our modern day depiction of Santa Claus, wasn't he?

• 2:33Nick Capodice?

  He was. He's credited with the first illustration of what we now think of as Santa in 1863. But as you know, he is perhaps even more famous for parodying one of the great villains in New York politics.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  The political powerhouse that he mostly targeted was, who ran New York at that time, Boss Tweed. Boss Tweed pretty much put Thomas Nast on his blacklist, you know? And he got really upset whenever he was made fun of in the, in the New York papers.

• 3:04Nick Capodice?

  William "Meager" Tweed, also known as Boss Tweed, ran something called Tammany Hall.

• 3:10Hannah McCarthy?

  By the way, listeners, there was no physical hall, no actual building called Tammany Hall. Tammany Hall was a political machine in the 1800s.

• 3:20Nick Capodice?

  Right. Though I think there is a bar in Manhattan called Tammany Hall, that is not what we're talking about here. Tammany Hall was a relentlessly corrupt group that bought politicians and newspapers and judges. They rigged elections. They courted immigrant voters in particular, all to ensure that they were reelected in perpetuity. So Thomas Nast drew dozens of cartoons pointing out Tweed's corruption, and it made Tweed furious.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  And finally, an aide went up to Boss Tweed and said, like, "Why are you so upset over these cartoons? Why are you, why does this cartoonist bother you so much? You're also getting bad, bad articles written about you. There's, there's bad press about you. Why are there this fixation on Thomas Nast?" And apparently Boss Tweed said, "My constituents can't read, but they can see pictures, damn it."

• 4:11Speaker 04

  So despite the low opinion he had of his constituents, I think that sort of really is a great example of like the power of cartoons through their immediacy. The way they can crystallize an idea, the way they can grab attention in a very unique and particular way, embedded among newspapers or now that we encounter them on social media. There's like a clarity to cartooning that I think is threatening to people whose goal is to maybe obscure the truth or to like put their own spin on events. And you know, you're hitting the right mark when people in positions of authority are fixated, like on cartoons are really upset by them, you know, you know, you're making an impact.

• 4:48Nick Capodice?

  Funny side story, I can't help but tell you Hannah, Boss Tweed was finally arrested for embezzling $6 million. He escaped jail and fled to Spain. And he was arrested in Spain because Spanish authorities were reading a newspaper with one of Nast's comics in it.

• 5:07Nick Capodice?

  Like, this kind of looks like the guy from the cartoon.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  And then later on, you know, Nixon had a blacklist that included political cartoonists. There's cartoonists who rankled, you know, Bush during the Iraq war.

• 5:18Hannah McCarthy?

  Wait, a cartoonist made Nixon's enemies list?

• 5:22Nick Capodice?

  Yes, several did. One was Paul Conrad. He was an editorial cartoonist for the LA Times. Though I do want to be fair, Nixon's list was expansive, hundreds of names. It had a lot of celebrities like Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, June Foray. Do you know June Foray?

• 5:40Hannah McCarthy?

  I have no idea who that is.

• 5:42Nick Capodice?

  She is the voice of Rocky the squirrel from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

• 5:47Speaker 05

  Now here's something we hope you'll really like.

• 5:50Hannah McCarthy?

  Why on earth was she on the enemies list?

• 5:54Nick Capodice?

  She testified before the Joint Economic Committee that inflation was out of control and Nixon did not like that. But it wasn't just President Nixon who clashed with cartoonists. Herbert Block, known as Her Block, also happened to be on Nixon's enemies list. Herbert Block was going to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. But after Her Block published an anti-Vietnam cartoon, Johnson withdrew the medal.

• 6:26Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, so I get Tom's point about how cartoons can really skewer people in power and, you know, how those people don't like it. But I also wonder if they feel, you know, like personally attacked, if they feel kind of bullied. Presidents are rarely portrayed as being particularly attractive in cartoons. Do you think that bothers them?

• 6:47Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, I wonder about that. Have you ever been impersonated, Hannah?

• 6:52Hannah McCarthy?

  It's really only my friend Josh, who I have a tendency to reference the fact that my father is really good at fixing things and building houses. And anytime I even start to say something, Josh will be like, "I'm Hannah McCarthy, and wouldn't my father just sweep right in and fix it all up?" So yeah, that's Josh's impression of me.

• 7:14Nick Capodice?

  To be fair, you sound nothing like that. In elementary school, during a particularly rough phase in my childhood, I was nicknamed "according to my calculations."

• 7:25Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:26Nick Capodice?

  And people would say, "I'm Nick, and I'm a fan of prestidigitation and ledger domain." And I deeply enjoy that in hindsight, but at the time, in fourth grade, I was pretty wrecked. And what wrecked me was that it took stuff about me that's actually kind of true and pumped that stuff up to the max. And this is what political cartoonists do every day.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  Caricature is one of the key components of cartooning, right? Caricature relies upon an audience's familiarity with the subject, right? Because when you're exaggerating or lampooning, and so there's almost no one more, you know, high-profile in a society than the leader of that society. So when you're doing caricature, not only is it sort of incumbent upon cartoonists to make fun of those in positions of power and to, you know, question them and to sort of push transgress as much as possible, but you also have to do it in a way that's recognizable. An audience knowing what the president looks like helps you as a cartoonist, because then you can do your rendition of that. You know, exaggerate their physical characteristics, like famously Obama with his ears, you know,

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Bush with his like little pointy nose and his little neck. And so like, you can do that sort of thing, and I think that's because you're playing off of more reference points that the audience is familiar with.

• 8:44Nick Capodice?

  All right, we're going to talk a little bit more about making fun of those in power, as well as some of the most famous political cartoons in US history, right after a quick break.

• 8:53Hannah McCarthy?

  But before that break, if you want to support public radio and shows like Civics 101, please consider donating to our show. There's a link in the notes for this episode, and especially since the congressional rescission of funds allocated for public radio stations like ours, it helps us a great deal.

• 9:09Nick Capodice?

  Sure does.

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• 9:57Nick Capodice?

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• 10:22Nick Capodice?

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• 12:38Nick Capodice?

  We are back. We are talking parody and satire in the political world, specifically in the realm of political cartoons.

• 12:47Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, Nick, you got a Hall of Fame of the greatest, most impactful cartoons in US history?

• 12:52Nick Capodice?

  I certainly do. I'm gonna put pictures to each of these on our website. I will put a link in the show notes if any of you want to look along as you listen.

• 13:00Hannah McCarthy?

  Just not if you're driving.

• 13:01Nick Capodice?

  Not if you're driving. Please, not if you're driving. All right, so the first on my list, which is maybe the most famous political cartoon ever drawn, came from before we were a country. You know what I'm talking about here, Hannah?

• 13:16Hannah McCarthy?

  You're talking about a snake.

• 13:20Nick Capodice?

  In 1754, Benjamin Franklin published a cartoon in the Pennsylvania Gazette. It was a depiction of a snake, cut up into eight pieces, each piece having the name of a different colony on it, and below, the ominous words, "Join or Die." Now, this cartoon was originally written to inspire the colonies to get together in the wake of the French and Indian War to manage money and defenses. But, pretty soon, it took on an entirely new meaning.

• 13:52Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, the "Join or Die" motto had a big resurgence during the American Revolution. I recently learned that it was printed in a New York newspaper every single week for a year.

• 14:02Nick Capodice?

  Really?

• 14:03Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:04Nick Capodice?

  Actually, one of my favorite modern-day cartoonists, Kate Beaton, she has a really good one of Benjamin Franklin being hassled by his editor. The editor's like, "Maybe you should write 'British Control' on top of the snake and have King George on the side with a knife that says 'Taxes.'"

• 14:21Nick Capodice?

  All right, I got one more oldie but a goodie, Hannah. It is a pair of cartoons by the aforementioned Thomas Nast. One is called "Third Term Panic," and the other one, ah...

• 14:35Hannah McCarthy?

  What?

• 14:37Nick Capodice?

  I am hesitating to say the title of this cartoon, Hannah, because teachers sometimes play our episodes in class. But it's the title of a cartoon from the 1800s. The title being "A Fine Ass Committee."

• 14:52Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, OK, so it's a donkey.

• 14:54Nick Capodice?

  It is.

• 14:56Hannah McCarthy?

  And does Third Term Panic maybe have an elephant in it?

• 14:59Nick Capodice?

  Yep, sure does.

• 15:00Hannah McCarthy?

  Are these the first depictions of the donkey and the elephant representing the two parties?

• 15:04Nick Capodice?

  They are, sort of. The Democrats as a donkey goes all the way back to Andrew Jackson. But NAST is entirely responsible for creating the GOP elephant symbology. And I think it's kind of funny, because in the cartoon, the elephant is clumsily smashing the planks of his own platform.

• 15:22Hannah McCarthy?

  OK, so not something that you would necessarily want to tie to your purty. And you know what? Thinking about it, maybe not donkeys either.

• 15:29Nick Capodice?

  That's just the way it goes, Hannah.

• 15:32Nick Capodice?

  All right, last cartoon, and this one happened in our lifetimes, and I had almost forgotten about it, but it was a big deal. Here to break it down again is our friend, colleague, and New Yorker cartoonist, Tom Toro.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  Barry Blitt came to national attention during the Obama years. I think it was during Obama's first presidential run, when he did a cover depicting Michelle Obama and Barack Obama in the Oval Office fist bumping. And Obama was in, like, traditional, sort of, Arab garb, and Michelle was dressed up, like, you know, a radical Islamist, with, like, an AK-47 over her shoulder, and they were fist bumping.

• 16:09Speaker 06

  Barack Obama's campaign is calling it "tasteless and offensive." It's a satirical New Yorker magazine cover showing Obama dressed as a Muslim. His wife is a terrorist.

• 16:21Nick Capodice?

  If this were on the cover of Time Magazine or Newsweek, I would be more likely to think that this would be perpetuating false beliefs.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  And it was meant to sort of portray the stereotypes that were being thrown at them, or the fear that conservatives had around like, they were actually like a secret cell coming to like take over our country, you know, like, they were like a terrorist cell. David Remnick, the editor, had to actually get on, you know, cable TV and like explain the cover.

• 16:44Speaker 07

  The intent of the cover is to satirize the vicious and racist attacks and rumors and misconceptions about the Obamas that have been floating around in the blogosphere and are reflected in public opinion polls.

• 16:56Hannah McCarthy?

  So it wasn't saying the Obamas were what the cartoon depicted. It was making fun of people who thought they were.

• 17:04Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. And I gotta mention, shortly before this cartoon, when Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, he gave Michelle Obama a fist pound. And a commentator on Fox News named E.D. Hill said this.

• 17:19Speaker 08

  A fist bump, a pound, a terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently. Wow.

• 17:28Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. And the cartoonist Blit was excoriating in the press for this cartoon. But that is the world of comedy. Comedy is often about going just a little bit too far.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  There's a great metaphor that the editor, who I broke in under Bob Ankauf, who's since retired, he has this metaphor for humor and how humor works, where it's like, imagine you're at a zoo, and there's a lion behind the bars of a cage. That's a good zoo. Now imagine the lion's not there and it's just the empty cage. That's a bad zoo. But now imagine the lion is out of the cage and the bars are behind the lion and the lion is actually on your side of the cage. That's a worse zoo. Right? So it's like, where is that line? Right? You want there to be some sense of... Not necessarily aggression, but transgression, right? Like, you're pushing the boundary.

• 18:23Speaker 04

  And so it's about finding for your audience, in the context that you're working inside of, like, where do those cage bars have to be? Because you want there to be a sense of danger. You want there to be a sense of subversion to your humor. But if you're too aggressive, then your message gets lost just in the offensiveness. It's almost being offensive for the sake of being offensive. And it's not being offensive for the sake of, like, making a point or making an argument. You're just trying to rankle sensibilities. But it's like finding out where that lion belongs and where that cage bar belongs is like the balancing act that we're always, you know, undergoing as a cartoonist and humorist.

• 18:59Hannah McCarthy?

  Are there any unspoken rules in the world of political cartoons? Are they things you just don't do?

• 19:05Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, there are. And of course, if we are talking the nebulous world of comedy, there are going to be exceptions to everything, and these rules are broken every day. But the number one rule is don't punch down, punch up. And to sort of encapsulate what that means, the satirist Molly Evans, whose books I loved as a kid, she once said, quote, "Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel, it is vulgar." And tied to this, punch up no matter who is in charge.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  To be just as critical of Democratic administrations as you are as Republican administrations. And when that comes and goes, then I start to be suspicious of your project as an artist, right? If you're like, soft pedaling stuff the Republican administration does, and you're sort of over emphasizing mistakes that the Democratic administration makes, then you're kind of on board with a particular political party. And I think it's incumbent upon artists and political cartoonists to be equal opportunity offenders. You have to be just as strident against all powers that be. And it's also deeply scary. I mean, it's scary to go up against any... Regime of censorship. We have examples all over the world of cartoonists working

• 20:27Speaker 04

  under actual authoritarian regimes and actual oppressive regimes who have been jailed, killed, have had to flee. History has shown us time and time again that when authoritarians take control, the first thing they do is try to silence humorists. Because there's something about it, which is like, there's the sort of overused metaphor of the canary in the coal mine.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  And cartoonists get threats of violence all the time. In particular, in our country, women political cartoonists are especially the targets of, if not outright threats, disproportionate online vitriol. I know Ann Telney, who used to work for The Washington Post before she quit in protest from one of her cartoons getting cut.

• 21:12Nick Capodice?

  Did you see that cartoon, Hannah?

• 21:14Hannah McCarthy?

  I think so. This was the one of tech oligarchs worshiping at the feet of Donald Trump, holding bags of money.

• 21:20Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, all of whom pledged to make massive donations towards Donald Trump's inauguration.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  The Washington Post, which is now owned by Jeff Bezos, cut that cartoon. They killed it. They didn't want to run it. And so she quit in protest and ended up posting the... So then they actually made the cartoon more famous than it would have been otherwise because then she posted it and it went viral online. But I remember talking to her one time and she's an equal opportunity offender. I know she did the cartoons against Obama as well, but her Trump stuff started to get a lot of online vitriol directed at her. So cartoonists are the targets of threats and doxing and that sort of thing just as much as political commentators across the spectrum.

• 22:04Hannah McCarthy?

  So Nick, moving out of the cartoon world into the humor world more generally, you talked to Tom the week after Jimmy Kimmel was taken off the air.

• 22:15Speaker 09

  That's right. This is fast developing this afternoon, Jake, amid pressure from the Trump-aligned FCC. And in the past few minutes, ABC confirmed to CNN that Kimmel's show will be off the air, quote, indefinitely.

• 22:27Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, I talked to him literally the day after Kimmel's show went back on at ABC.

• 22:32Hannah McCarthy?

  Did Tom have any thoughts about that?

• 22:34Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, unsurprisingly, he did. We talked about Jimmy Kimmel's monologue on the night of his return. And I think the whole Jimmy Kimmel situation is one that all comedians care deeply about.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  We're not very important. At the end of the day, will the world end if Jimmy Kimmel is no longer allowed to make jokes on the air? Ultimately, no, right? Like, life will go on. It's not crucial to the existence of our civilization. And yet, by the very fact that it is relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things, it makes it more scary that it would be the target of censorship, right? Because why? Because you start there, and then where does it lead, right? It's the first step toward a greater project of silencing bad stories. And I think that, you know, it's an indication of-- it's more revealing of the nature of power than it is of the nature of the comedian, right? If

• 23:28Speaker 04

  you're that sensitive toward jokes, then probably, you know, you do not believe in democracy in some fundamental way, right? If he is the target of censorship, then like, you know, then where do the rest of us stand?

• 23:54Nick Capodice?

  Well, that's it for Political Cartoons and Cartooning today on Civics 101. Check out Tom's new book. I've had a peek at it, and it's hilarious. This episode is made by me, Nick Capodice, with Hannah McCarthy. Thank you, Hannah. Our staff includes Marina Henke and our executive producer, Rebecca LaVoy. Music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions, Epidemic Sound, and the great Chris Sabriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 24:24Speaker 05

  Why is it that the that the animals enjoy reading the email?

• 24:28Speaker 10

  Well, Ms. Bennis, cartoons are like gossamer, and one doesn't dissect gossamer.

• 24:35Speaker 05

  Well, you don't have to dissect it.

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