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War Propaganda and Humour: World War II German, British, and Soviet Cartoons
accept the humorous message only because we find it funny, and we reject it only
because we do not find it funny.
In the situation of war, humour appears whenever the immediate task of propa¬
ganda is temporary relaxation rather than mobilisation. Ihis can be achieved by
employing at least one of the following options:
(1) The enemy can be pictured as weak, absurd, or helpless if still vicious. In
Arthur Johnson’s cartoon (Fig. 34), the anti-Nazi coalition leaders are but
three clowns jostling each other in a futile circular motion around Europe.
The futility of the enemies’ actions is carried to the extreme in Ernest
H. Shepard’s cartoon, which strongly resembles John Tenniel’s illustrations
to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books (Fig. 35) and features Hitler and Goering
performing a suicidal acrobatic stunt called The Spring Offensive. This is
a typical example of pure English nonsense because in addition to the utter
idiocy of the scene, rendered in a realistic and laidback Victorian manner,
it is based on an equally silly pun. No less absurd is the Munchausen-type
scene depicted by Boris Efimov. Here, Hitler’s idea of total mobilisation
is allegorised by a dying horse ridden by the Reich leaders and supported
by the monkey-like Goebbels,’ who is trying to lift the animal out of the
quagmire (Fig. 36).
Because the principal aim of such cartoons is to banish fear of the enemy
and to boost morale, their principal message can be read as ‘the enemy does
not deserve to be treated too seriously’. This agrees with Freud’s theory of
humour: the super-ego rejects the claims of reality and puts through the
pleasure principle: “Look! Here is the world which seems so dangerous! It is
nothing but a game for children—just worth making a jest about” (Freud
1928: 6). Herein lies the semantic difference between invective and hu¬
mour. Even when invective appears to distort reality, it still refers to reality;
even when humour appears to be realistic, it still seeks to replace reality with
a “game for children”. While the ostensible message of wartime humour is
that the enemy should not be treated seriously, its meta-message is that the
message itself should not be treated seriously either. As a result, in keeping
with Kant, we are left with “nothing’—a salubrious alternative to tension
and fear.
> Christie Davies believes that “the monkey is ridiculous and inferior but not altogether alien or malign”
(Davies 2014: 24). Indeed, the presumed animal was different—the mouse; not an actual mouse, though,
but Walt Disney’s image of it. Hitler adored Disney's films, and Ernst Röhm had nicknamed Goebbels
“Wotan’s Mickey Mouse”—an idea that Efimov seized. However, because Disney’s charming hero is quite
unlike the hideous Goebbels, and because the mouse is a very unusual metaphor in caricature, many
perceived Efimov’s character as a monkey. Low, who admired Efimoy, regarded his Goebbels as a rat (see
his foreword to Efimov in Low 1944; see also Norris 2010).
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