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CartoonInterpretation 7 - 19 Apr 2009 - Main.GregOrr
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What's the joke here? Do you have any feelings about it? | | | I didn't initially make the connection to our class, but I like Justin's characterizations. But wouldn't that imply that Eben is doing something impossible? In my mind, the next frame of the cartoon is the flying penguin belly-flopping into the sea with his comrades laughing in delight - perhaps my physics background is just over-analyzing a simple cartoon.
-- KeithEdelman - 12 Apr 2009 | |
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> | So, anyway, my lawyer wife has taken up painting. We decided that she would recreate three New Yorker cartoons for our bathroom. I immediately thought the penguin one was saying something like "live within your nature." It's funny to think of penguins feeling bad about themselves, feeling that they could fly if only they tried harder... We love penguins! New Yorker cartoons often make ironic metaphors for modern anxieties, and I just assumed that's what the artist had in mind. That kind of intention has a cute, sweet, melancholy kind of intimacy, whereas more direct interpretations, while in a sense optimistic, feed feelings of inadequacy.
Further, I see a more general kind of lesson, something like "if only we could see ourselves as others do." We see all that stressful flapping as this poor guy putting too much pressure on himself - penguins aren't supposed to fly. (Whether the penguins on the iceberg share this point of view, I'm not sure. Maybe they vary, with the wise old ones seeing it this way, some of his peers feeling jealous or insecure, some of the young ones filled with wonder... This may be reading too much into it.)
So I liked the cartoon and voted for it when my wife was choosing what to paint. It now hangs in our bathroom. I didn't realize other people wouldn't have the same interpretation, and it was only after some confused back and forth with friends that I discovered most people actually see it more like you all have. As it turns out, even my wife had something else in mind. I still think my interpretation holds up, but I'm not completely sure, and it's hard to know how much contrary evidence to absorb before giving up my view. At a minimum, I can say that people in my bathroom are getting the wrong idea about what I mean. But then we get to talk about it, which is fun.
Here are our other two:
-- GregOrr - 19 Apr 2009 |
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