New Yorker Cartoon

johnwesley
Tue, 03 May 2005 15:52:27 +0000

Well, yeah, it wouldn’t be a New Yorker cartoon if didn’t involve a member of the upper class. And I think that like all New Yorker cartoons, there’s a marvelous ambiguity and tension between what we see (a meal being interrupted during the soup course) and what we know is actually going on. What we see is the matron’s hand covering the phone’s receiver as if what she has just heard (“Oliver” wanting to have a voice in something) is scandalous and perhaps even dangerous. What we know about the period (the mid to late 1960s) is that upper class homes all over the country were being rocked by differences over the war in Vietnam, civil rights (the movie, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”, about a similarly situated family, opened in 1967–the year of our cartoon), drugs, music and sex. Almost exactly a year later in April of 1968, Columbia students would occupy the office of their president, Grayson Kirk–himself, the very epitome of a New Yorker cartoon. The Eastern Seaboard Establishment was self-destructing pretty much in the full glare of the national public. Which makes the cartoon that much more poignant; because in all probability–and like that phone call home from Oliver–they hadn’t the foggiest idea what their kids were talking about.