That unfunny New York Post cartoon

When I was a little girl, I’d always try to puzzle out the meaning of the editorial cartoons I’d see in the newspapers.

Invariably, I’d end up perplexed. They were cartoons, right? So shouldn’t they be funny?

As I’ve gotten older, my opinion about editorial cartoons hasn’t changed — I still don’t care for them much. When they are done well, they can provoke thought and serve as a powerful prick to the conscience.

Done well, they can they can assess a national mood or provide a terribly clever and cheeky way to comment on an issue in the current national spotlight.

But too often, editorial cartoons are not done well, and they end up neither funny nor enlightening.

And I’m sorry to say that’s the case with the little gem the New York Post recently dropped on its editorial page. Somehow, artist Sean Delonas thought it would be trenchant to combine one tragic event (a chimpanzee who was shot by police after grievously mauling a Connecticut woman) with perhaps the most catastrophic situation facing our country (economic collapse) along with the most feared possible happening (the assassination of a U.S. president) and roll it all up into one odious cartoon.

When I first heard about the cartoon, I hadn’t seen it yet, and I thought perhaps the people who saw racial overtones in the drawing were being too sensitive.

Then I saw it.

A dead chimp laying in a pool of blood with two bullet holes in his chest. The two cops who fired the shots talking about blowing away whoever authored the stimulus package.

So let me puzzle this one out.

Most Americans, regardless of political stripe, are angry right now about the collapse of our economy and worried about whether the stimulus package approved by Congress and signed into law Tuesday by President Barack Obama will actually get the country back on track.

Apparently, the cops in the cartoon are supposed to represent us, the skeptical and angry Americans.

And the chimpanzee laying in a pool of blood with two bullet holes in his chest that those cops just blew away? According to the cop’s comments, that represents the person (animal?) who wrote that stimulus package.

Who’s been the face of the stimulus package? Who’s been all over the country this week and last, campaigning for its passage? President Obama.

I don’t really see how anyone can see that drawing any other way. It’s not clever. It’s scary.

I’m not even going to get into the asinine historical portrayal of black people as monkeys that wraps this cartoon in an even thicker aura of bigotry and hatred. Or the defense that maybe the cops were simply saying the stimulus package was so dumb a monkey could have written it… and it had nothing to do with who is president right now.

In the face of overwhelming public disgust, here’s how the New York Post defended itself in a statement released today: “The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy.”

Mixing humor with serious issues can be done. I’m all for using humor as a device to make a point and to get people thinking critically about global and national issues.

I laugh myself silly at the over-the-top satire in The Onion. And I hurt myself giggling at the things-are-so-bad-I-could-cry-but-I’d rather-just-laugh wickedness of Wonkette.

I get the whole idea of finding humor in absurd juxtapositions, really, I do.

But I don’t think this one works. At all.