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Buck, Louisa. "Defining the British Political Cartoon." Framescapes. Graphic Narrative Intertexts. Eds. Mikhail Peppas and Sanabelle Ebrahim. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Pr. 2016. 39–49. Added by: joachim (1/20/18, 5:27 PM) |
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| Resource type: Book Chapter Language: en: English BibTeX citation key: Buck2016 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: Caricature, Definition, Parody, Randformen des Comics, United Kingdom Creators: Buck, Ebrahim, Peppas Publisher: Inter-Disciplinary Pr. (Oxford) Collection: Framescapes. Graphic Narrative Intertexts |
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Situated within the realms of popular culture and the modern inclination towards ‘dumbing down,’ political cartoons are an anomaly. Simultaneously they are ephemeral, as well as being charged with historical meaning. They appear in the broadsheet newspapers, with high expectations of education and class orientation from its readership. Massively intertextual, their palimpsestuous nature is played out in the newspapers, where, in a rare opportunity, they appear to be given free reign to provoke and offend. Serving as a struggle against hegemony, the political cartoons spotlight particular trends within public opinion and can be seen as a direct critique, ridicule and/or resistance against government, government figures and government policies. Paraphrasing George Orwell’s essay ‘Funny but not vulgar,’ Martin Rowson declared that ‘every joke is a small revolution,’ in a recent talk at the Cartoon Museum. Rowson considers the political cartoon to be ‘an oasis of anarchy in the topography of newspapers’. The Political Cartoon lies between satire and serious commentary ‘Throwing light on taboo’ they ‘comment from a marginal position on prominent issues’. In April 1980 Margaret Thatcher said the cartoon was ‘the most concentrated and cogent form of comment and just about the most skilled and the most memorable, giving the picture of events that remained most in the mind’. A seal of approval that would probably have most cartoonists cringing in their graves. A genre defined by its opposites, its blatant use of parody and pastiche, and its disrespect for rules is presented.
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