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War Propaganda and Humour: World War II German, British, and Soviet Cartoons
it reguires more effort from the artist and from the viewer alike and is ipso facto
perceived as serious. A cartoon painted in oil is as hard to imagine as a joke in the
form of a psychological novel. A flippant graphic caricature, which is usually more
distorting and hyperbolic than a painting and often portrays friends and even cult
figures, can be unconsciously perceived as humorous. Sometimes, as in the case of
Kukryniksy’s cartoon, this may strikingly disagree with the artists’ conscious intent.
Boris Efimov’s sketch of Stalin (Fig. 41), drawn in 1924 when caricaturing lead¬
ers was still possible, looks ominous to us, and yet it had been destined for publica¬
tion in a party periodical. Although it was rejected, no trouble for the artist ensued,
evidently because the sketch was justly deemed humorous, not satiric.
But if everyone including idols can be caricatured so mercilessly, and if such
caricatures can still be interpreted as good-natured, then we must admit that with¬
out prior knowledge about the prototypes it is hard to tell a hostile (satiric) carica¬
ture from a friendly (humorous) one unless an entire scene suggesting an interpre¬
tation is depicted and/or a caption is provided, as in Figures 30-32. The meaning
of the image thus becomes critically dependent on the context.
Taken by itself, the scene depicted in Figure 40 provides no clues as to its mean¬
ing. No one considers physiognomy a science anymore. Anyone’s face can look gro¬
tesque in the distorting mirror of caricature. Do these people look hideous because
they are criminals or because this is a cartoon? Are their grotesquely exaggerated
features inherent in their diabolic nature? To what crimes can a pointed nose or
bushy eyebrows testify? Is it possible that these images refer to entirely different
people, possibly queer but in no way criminal, such as, for instance, the Pickwick
club members or, at worst, Gogol’s heroes? Is it not so that even the monstrous
Goering in the cartoon matches Gogol’s description of Sobakevich in Dead Souls?
In short, is the satirists’ accusation serious or humorous?!’ While the answers to
these questions appear immediately evident, it is only because we know them in
advance. If no answers are available a priori, then there are no a posteriori answers
either because the humorous form emancipates itself from our conscious intent
and diverts our minds from seriousness to play.
It might appear that these are but theoretical subtleties of no practical relevance,
at least as far as propaganda is concerned. Satire, it would seem, always preaches
to the converted. True, but what exactly does it preach? Ridiculing people entails
the risk of humanising them. After all, being laughable is still better than being
odious. Chaplin’s Great Dictator (1940) was conceived as a satire, but its humorous
form, specifically the circus gags Chaplin the actor loved so much, undermined the
invective content Chaplin the director wished to embody. “Had I known of the
8 Gogol himself was plagued with this problem, and the distinction between the amusing and the
correcting functions of his work was so critical for him that his inability to resolve the issue eventually led
to a severe mental crisis. Similar crises, which befell other satirists such as Swift, Séedrin, Zoëtenko, and
others in their later years, demonstrate that distinguishing satire and humour is anything but an exercise
in pedantry.
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