Follow-Up: 'The New Yorker' Doesn't Get Why You Don't Get Its Cartoons

A while ago, we discussed the fact that The New Yorker produces many cartoons, the humor of which sometimes escapes us.

We were not the first to make this observation, and the magazine has now run a feature that's either refreshingly self-deprecating or completely passive-aggressive, and I can't figure out which.

The conundrum, after the jump.

 

In "I Don't Get It" — which is subtitled "A Cartoon I.Q. Test" — they present five of their cartoons that people apparently claimed they didn't get, and then there's a quiz where you guess what was supposed to be funny about them.

On the one hand, it seems a little bit like they're poking fun at themselves (claiming a cartoon is "so ahead of its time" that it makes no sense to anyone is something I am fairly sure isn't meant to be taken quite at face value).

On the other hand, one of the right answers is that "Sometimes it's jarring to the mind to see one thing juxtaposed with a slightly different thing. This is how comedy is made." This seems sarcastically, eye-rollingly aggravated, as if not finding that particular cartoon funny (in which baseball and Skee-Ball are juxtaposed) means you don't understand that juxtaposition of two disparate elements can be funny. I never like it when I look at any sentence directed at myself and think, "I at least appreciate the fact that the 'Well, dummy' is silent."

I find myself conflicted. Part of me wants to applaud them for embracing the fact that many people find the cartoons inscrutable, but part of me feels like they're making fun of me. I can't tell if they are helpfully trying to hold my hand as I cross the street of highbrow humor or satirizing the idea of rubes like me requiring hand-holding. Am I the butt of the joke, or are we in it together, just trying to figure out what makes one-panel humor work in this crazy world?

In next week's issue: "I Don't Get 'I Don't Get It.'"