"I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about"
About this Quote
For a political cartoonist, “the absurd” isn’t a taste for silliness; it’s a diagnostic tool. Jonathan Shapiro is pointing to a craft truth that gets missed when people treat cartoons as decorative opinion: the job is to make contradictions visible, fast. Absurdity is the shortcut. It lets a drawing do what a column often can’t in the same space - compress a whole chain of institutional doubletalk into a single image that feels instantly, almost embarrassingly, obvious.
The subtext is that hypocrisy rarely announces itself as hypocrisy. It hides behind procedure, respectability, and the soothing language of “norms.” A sense of the absurd is how you puncture that protective coating. When a politician praises “family values” while cashing checks from moral panic; when a government sells surveillance as “safety”; when a corporation markets virtue while externalizing harm - the surreal mismatch is the point. Shapiro is essentially arguing that skepticism isn’t an attitude you tack on at the end; it’s a sensibility you cultivate at the start, tuned to the gap between what power says and what power does.
Context matters: political cartooning lives in the churn of daily news, where outrageousness competes with exhaustion. Absurdity becomes both lens and weapon - a way to cut through spin without sounding preachy, and a way to keep your own moral compass from being numbed by repetition. The best cartoons don’t just accuse; they reveal that the official story already contains its own punchline.
The subtext is that hypocrisy rarely announces itself as hypocrisy. It hides behind procedure, respectability, and the soothing language of “norms.” A sense of the absurd is how you puncture that protective coating. When a politician praises “family values” while cashing checks from moral panic; when a government sells surveillance as “safety”; when a corporation markets virtue while externalizing harm - the surreal mismatch is the point. Shapiro is essentially arguing that skepticism isn’t an attitude you tack on at the end; it’s a sensibility you cultivate at the start, tuned to the gap between what power says and what power does.
Context matters: political cartooning lives in the churn of daily news, where outrageousness competes with exhaustion. Absurdity becomes both lens and weapon - a way to cut through spin without sounding preachy, and a way to keep your own moral compass from being numbed by repetition. The best cartoons don’t just accuse; they reveal that the official story already contains its own punchline.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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