Satire can make people think, or it can motivate them to violence, Judith Reynolds, political cartoonist and journalist, told a Durango audience Thursday.
Speaking at the opening of the Fort Lewis College Life-Long Learning Lecture Series at the Durango Arts Center, Reynolds said in a worst case, terrorists massacred 11 people at the French weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7, 2015. The reason: a political cartoon.
Reynolds defined satire as work that employs humor, irony and exaggeration to expose human folly, corruption or hypocrisy.
Also, satire is always controversial. Sometimes, it leads to serious consequences, for example, when people hunt or kill cartoonists because of their cartoons.
Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard drew a controversial cartoon about the Islamic prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, and Swedish artist Lars Vilks had sketches that were offensive to some people – again about the prophet Muhammad. Westergaard was attacked with an ax but survived. Vilks has been targeted several times, and an attack at an art show he organized left one person dead and three injured.
Such threats and attacks can lead to self-censorship, when cartoonists hesitate to do their work because they fear for their lives, Reynolds said.
Reynolds showed many cartoons, recent ones as well as ones from the last 200 years, American ones as well as ones from France and Britain. In most cases, the cartoons had the audience in Durango Thursday laughing loudly.
Later, she wanted the audience members to find their own boundaries between humor and offense. For this, she showed cartoons about the United States, which often included the figure of Uncle Sam in many critical and uncomfortable ways. The cartoons included the Vietnam War and Iraq war. After a few of these cartoons, audience laughter became noticeably less frequent and quieter.
The audience’s cautious reactions led Reynolds to the conclusion: “Everybody has his own boundaries.”
Even she does, she admitted. She has cartoons she didn’t want to show during the presentation because she finds them too insulting and provocative.
Thomas Feiler is a student at the Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Germany, and an intern at The Durango Herald.
