Did Johnny Hart -- the beloved creator of
"B.C." and one of the most widely read cartoonists on Earth -- sneak
a vulgar defamation of Islam into the comics pages
last week? The question was raised yesterday by the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based civil rights group, in an
e-mail to its membership. Hart and his syndicate say no -- that a
simple, straightforward joke is being misconstrued. That may well be true, but
the 73-year-old cartoonist's history of evangelizing his
Christian beliefs through his comic cavemen have left many people
doubtful.
The cartoon, which appeared Nov. 10 in more
than 1,200 newspapers worldwide -- including The Washington Post -- shows a
caveman entering an outhouse at night, and then saying, from inside, "Is
it just me, or does it stink in here?" The first public
questioning of this cartoon arose in a washingtonpost.com chat Tuesday, when a
reader noted that the cartoon seemed to make no sense, except metaphorically.
The reader noted that the cartoon contained six crescent moons -- three in the
sky, and three on the outhouse door -- and wondered if this might have been a
veiled slur on the world's 1 billion practicing Muslims.
The CAIR e-mail mentioned the moons, and
also noted that Hart had drawn a prominent sound effect -- "SLAM" --
between two frames to accompany the closing of the outhouse door. The SLAM was
stacked vertically, in the shape of an I, and could be
seen to signify "Islam." The cartoon appeared on the 15th day of
Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.
In the past, Hart has gotten into trouble
for religious-themed strips--most notably on one recent Easter Sunday when his
strip showed the seven candles of a Jewish menorah being extinguished, one by
one, with each image accompanied by one of Jesus Christ's last utterances. As
the last flame disappeared, and the words "It is finished" appeared,
the menorah became a cross.
Many Jewish readers were outraged, claiming
Hart was making the argument that Christianity had extinguished Judaism as a
"better" religion. Hart denied it, protesting that the cartoon was
intended to honor both religions. To many, his explanation seemed hollow.
Asked about the outhouse strip this week,
Hart denied that it was about Islam at all. He said that interpretation stunned
him. "My goodness. That's
incredible. That's unbelievable!" He said it was just a
"silly" bathroom joke, wrapped around the cliché "Is it just me,
or . . . ?" According to Hart, the joke was about the ambiguous authorship
of a bad smell. The SLAM, Hart said, was simply there to show that the caveman
had walked into the outhouse. The crescent moons were there to indicate it was
nighttime, and because outhouses have crescent moons.
"This comic was in no way intended to
be a message against Islam -- subliminal or otherwise," he said. "It
would be contradictory to my own faith as a Christian to insult other people's
beliefs. If you should have any further silly notions about malicious intent
from this quarter, you can save yourself a phone call."
Richard S. Newcombe,
the president of Creators Syndicate, said any religious interpretation is
"reading too much into it." Hart, he said, often uses
sound effects in his strips, and crescent moons to indicate nighttime. Plus, he
has never been at all subtle in his religious strips, Newcombe
said; "Why would he suddenly become Hercule Poirot, secretly planting clues?" A fair question. Maybe because he had never
tried anything this incendiary before? Nonsense, Newcombe said. To suggest there was a bigoted hidden
message in this strip, he said, would be "race baiting."
"Why is the door slamming? You don't slam
an outhouse door." This is Marshall Blonsky,
professor of semiotics at the New School in New York. Blonsky
is an expert in the interpretation of signs and symbols. The first thing he
said, on seeing the cartoon, is that he didn't get the joke. The second thing
he said was that the outhouse is clearly serving some metaphoric purpose:
"It represents something that stinks in the world." And the third
thing he said was that there was something very puzzling about that SLAM.
"It's inappropriate," he said.
"You gently close an outhouse door." One does not ordinarily
enter an outhouse in anger or with a melodramatic flourish, he said. One
utilizes this particular convenience in as unobtrusive a way as possible. Blonsky said the cartoon seemed in some way
manipulative -- constructed in "a polysemic
fashion, to supply multiple meanings that would deliberately evade
interpretation." When told of the religious interpretation, he said that
in this light, the cartoon suddenly made logical sense. The coincidences were
simply too great to ignore, he said.
The Washington
Post asked six well-known cartoonists -- all admirers of Johnny Hart -- to
look at the strip. Most said they had no idea what the joke was supposed to
be. When the religious interpretation was suggested, five of the six thought it
was probably right, even given Hart's denial. "It's highly,
overwhelmingly, incontrovertibly suspicious," said Berkeley Breathed,
creator of "Bloom County" and the new Sunday-only strip
"Opus." "There's no explanation for that gag without Islam. It's
meaningless."
"That vertical SLAM is completely
unnecessary to whatever surface gag is there," said Jeff Mallett, creator of the nationally syndicated cartoon
"Frazz." The cartoon would work equally
well, and far more efficiently, Mallett said, without
the prominent sound effect. "And other than the excuse to add three more
crescents, there was no need to set the scene at night. I'll be among the first
to complain that the comics are too sterile. But the last thing we need to
spice things up is some secret jihad."
Bob Staake, author
of "The Complete Book of Humorous Art," an analysis of contemporary
cartooning, calls it "as fascinating as it is suspicious. When you dissect
it, as a cartoon, it flat-out doesn't work, and you can drive yourself crazy
trying to figure out what it means. But it doesn't take a conspiracy freak to
see it as an odd, twisted, inappropriate slam at a quirky religion."
Only "Doonesbury"'s
Garry Trudeau demurred. "We cartoonists are simple folk. We
don't write on that cryptic a level. Leave Johnny alone."
It could be argued that Johnny Hart often does
write on a cryptic level. He has used symbols ingeniously, particularly when
his cartoon is about religion. Once he drew an elegant cartoon decrying the
commercialization of Christmas, in which a cross seen through a window turns
out to be the ribbon on a giant Christmas present. Like many
cartoon strips, Johnny Hart's "B.C." often has pedestrian, clichéd
jokes. But every once in a while he shows brilliant moves --
sometimes accompanied by lamentable social insensitivity. Just two days
after the SLAM cartoon, he published one in which two prehistoric ants walk out
of a cave marked "School of Linguistics." One says to the other,
"My dad sells ice machines." And the other ant replies,
"Cool." Then the first ant says, "My dad is out of work."
And the second ant says, "Bummer."
Hart is revealing both his fascination with
wordplay and an old-fashioned disconnect with some societal niceties. He is
equating the state of being unemployed with the state of being a
"bum." Certainly clever, if politically incorrect.
In analyzing this cartoon, semiotician Blonsky cautions against succumbing to the Intentional
Fallacy: In criticism, he says, it is a mistake to give much weight at all to
the artist's stated intention. For one thing, it discounts the strength and
influence of the unconscious mind, he said. All that matters in artistic
criticism, he said, is the effect of the art on its viewers: the way people
interpret it. In other words, even if Hart intended no offense, the offense is
there.
For non-academics, though, the issue is
intent and intent only. If Hart did not intend to slur Islam, then he is
absorbing some terribly unfair criticism. But what if he did intend to slur
Islam? You need only read the Constitution to conclude that Johnny Hart had
every right to express whatever views he has. But was it right to do it
subversively, in what would amount to an act of intellectual sabotage?
Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR's spokesman, underscored the stealth: "I think the
reason there might not have been initial complaints is that it's so cryptic. If
you know who the cartoonist is, what he's done in the past, then
it becomes clear. Otherwise, it's just an unfunny joke."
Staff writer Alan Cooperman contributed
to this report.
