Americans and Chinese meets, laughs at pigs
Cartoon artist Daryl Cagle is travelling China on the request of the U.S. State Department to meet with his Chinese cartoonist counterparts and introduce Chinese audiences to American political cartoons. The result appears, to judge from his blog, to be successful in introducing two different cultures to each other, as the blog documents a series of curious cultural clashes. They are almost so strange it is hard to believe two cultures are so different. He reports that some of the questions he gets are like this (with his answers):
Do your cartoons hurt your personal relationships with the politicians you draw?
No, I don’t have personal relationships with the people I draw.
Do you worry that your drawings will hurt the reputation of someone you have drawn?
No, if one of my cartoons hurts the reputation of a politician that I am criticizing, then I am pleased. (Sometimes the crowd murmurs when I say this. It doesn’t seem to be what they expect me to say.)
Do you ever draw cartoons that are supportive of China?
No, I don’t draw cartoons that support anything. I just criticize. Supportive cartoons are lousy cartoons.
Now that you have visited China, and have learned more about China, will you be drawing cartoons that support China?
Probably not.
I don’t think it is particularly foreign to any western media consumer that news cartoons (or any other comedy directed at politics or current events) tries to hurt the reputation or feelings of a public figure. Quite to the contrary, this is typically the intention - and so ingrained that it is curious that anyone could even ask the question if a cartoonist would worry about this.
The Chinese, however, are more amused by funny drawings of pigs, according to Cagle:
For some reason I don’t understand, the Chinese audiences all laugh at pigs. My advice for any cartoonist giving a presentation to an audience in China is to show all the cartoons you’ve ever drawn with pigs in them.
Then again, are really politics that much more fun than pigs?
