Other Voices: Satire falls flat

Funny thing about a joke. When you have to explain it, that is proof the joke didn't work.

The editor of the New Yorker magazine has taken pains to explain that the cover of the current edition, depicting Sen. Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as fist-bumping, flag-burning Muslim radicals, is supposed to be political satire. Trouble is, nobody's laughing.

The target of the intended satire is the political culture that has disparaged the Illinois senator, a Christian, as a closet Muslim, and his spouse — depicted in camouflage and combat boots with an assault rifle slung over her shoulder — as an angry black woman out to make trouble. The only suggestion that the cover is not about Mr. and Mrs. Obama per se is its title, "The Politics of Fear."

The image plays to our fears, not our funny bone. To make a point, it relies on the very distortions it seeks to lampoon. This is why it didn't work — that and the fact that the distortions are based on lies and innuendo.

Political figures leave themselves open to criticism and the slings and arrows of outrageous satire when something in their character or behavior invites lampooning. Thus, Bill Clinton is depicted as a womanizer, Al Gore as a robot, John McCain as an old fogey, and President Bush as a clueless cowboy. We get it.

This is not the case with the way that Sen. Obama and his wife are depicted. It is one thing to poke fun at a wind-surfing John Kerry as hopelessly out of touch with the average American — a grain of truth there — and another to paint Sen. Obama as something he is not.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and in this case the picture of the first serious black contender for president of the United States as a Muslim fuels scurrilous rumors that prey on gullible voters.

Just because he is black does not mean that Obama should not be the object of satire, fair comment and even jabs of unfair comment. That's the nature of U.S. politics. Sen. Obama became fair game as soon as he entered politics.

The senator already has made rhetorical gaffes that leave him open to criticism as an elitist and a political neophyte. No doubt, he will offer satirists more fodder before it's over. But the whoop-de-do over the New Yorker generates controversy because it mixes race, religion, politics and violence in one false yet powerful image that says little about the candidate.

The New Yorker's editors may feel that their readers are sophisticated enough to get the joke. That says more about them than it does about either Obama or the wider culture. When nobody laughs and you have to explain the joke, the joke's on you.