Oh, Harold.

Douglas Cosby, you made a funny joke. Brad Wilson, I guess you didn't bother to look at what's written on the tablets? (Click to enlarge.) Don't feel bad: apparently either the editors actually didn't think that mattered anyway, or yours was just so much better than everyone else's that it was worth printing even though it had only the vaguest and most inattentive relation to the cartoon's actual content. You're only as bad as your competition.

"My piano is full of dead fish!"

The caption contest is just so embarrassingly bad, I was going to say I don't understand how The New Yorker can keep it going, but of course I understand: it's perfect for attracting attention and probably has a positive effect on readership. You'd like to think that a magazine like The New Yorker would put quality and integrity first, but that's not the world we live in. Quality is just another asset, integrity has dollar signs attached to it (before the number), and if the profit they'd make from printing Hustler-style pornography would outweigh the long-term loss of brand identity, then you can bet Larry Flynt would be wheeling on up to Harold Ross and William Shawn's old desk in no time. Am I being cynical? Very well, then I am being cynical. I am large, I contain cynicism.

Now I'm gonna lay into Hilton Als. In his review of Neil LaBute's new play, which I have not seen and have no opinion about, he ends by commenting on the fact that that the audience was amused by one particularly reprehensible character:

"...the night I attended the show, women laughed as uproariously at [Kent's] sexism as they did at Steph's cluelessness. It's as if LaBute's—by now canned and adolescent—'transgressive' point of view were what audiences needed in order to feel anarchic, to shed the boring safety of their lives. Watching women in the audience laugh at Steph's anger and Kent's arrogance is terrifying but predictable. It's rare that the oppressed don't identify with their oppressor."

That's a pretty intense accusation, and Als makes it even more intensely (just a little less directly) a little higher up in the column: "his physical strength and his resistance to thought are terribly attractive to women—or, at any rate, to women who conflate masculinity with insensitivity, and enjoy being objectified."

Again, I haven't seen this play. But I can't help but think, reading this, that Als might be missing the whole point. Is it possible that the audience's laughter isn't about identifying with an oppressor but rather mocking him? The superb "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel" (and almost certainly Kierkegaard, too, although I can speak with confidence only about the Barthelme story) suggests that irony can have the effect of temporarily "annihilating" that which you turn it against. When Jon Stewart mocked George W. Bush back when George W. Bush was winning elections, we didn't just laugh because it was funny: we laughed because it made Bush ridiculous, powerless. "Irony is a means of depriving the object of its reality in order that the subject may feel free...The object is deprived of its reality by what I have said about it. Regarded in an ironical light, the object shivers, shatters, disappears."

I saw In the Company of Men many years ago and don't remember it well but do remember thinking it was essentially a very dark comedy, and that you were supposed to think the main characters were horrible, horrible people. And while irony is a tricky thing (can so easily become junk irony, not to mention the problem of the "annihilation" in question's being almost always temporary—illusory, even*); while Als's sentence about phony transgression and the desire to feel anarchic is actually quite persuasive; while I do think that people have a tendency (counterintuitively) to love oppression and to hate freedom; and while (again, again) I have not seen this play—doesn't it seem just from reading Als's own account that the women who were laughing at this character were enjoying the character's being put in his place, in a way that was maybe just too subtle for some people to grasp?

Did I mention I haven't seen this play? But I do know one thing: when lots of people in an audience are laughing at something, and someone assumes they're laughing because of a kind of pathetic Stockholm S&M slave mentality...well, that might mean that this guy just didn't get the joke.

* "Though he may have won all the battles / We had all the good songs!"