‘I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it’: an exploratory study of the single-panel cartoon and the comic mode in society

ABSTRACT

Single-panel gag cartoons are behavioral records of the comic in society, or of how people manage what they find anxiety producing, annoying, or dismaying in their everyday affairs by transforming these experiences into humor, which is then used as a vehicle to manage difficult feelings and imagine new ways of conceptualizing their situation. Cartoons, thus, are products of the jokes and comic wit that are endemic in everyday life. Because most humor is evanescent, social scientists have not accorded the comic the full attention it deserves, conceiving it as merely a response to social forces – a type of situational adjustment – rather than acknowledging it as a social force in its own right produced by unconscious psychological dynamics that alert people to those aspects of the world, which invite attention and foster anxiety. Cartoons, therefore, are of value to social scientists not only as records of what large audiences in modern societies have found amusing at a given point in time, but also provide insight into various situations in mass society that create anxiety, and how people imagine defining and managing that anxiety.

KEYWORDS:

• Cartoons
• comedy
• pictures as social indicators
• visual sociology
• visual studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One of the best accounts of this process of change is Vaclav Smil Creating the Twentieth Century (2005); also instructive is Grady ‘Imagining the City as Home: Functional Prerequisites and Moral Challenges’ (2023).

2 One of the clearest documentations of editorial censorship are a series of books publishing selected cartoons by major artists that were rejected by The New Yorker (Diffee, 2006, 2007, 2022).

3 While the ‘y-axis’ clearly represents a timeline, Tufte has chosen some odd labeling for the other two axes in his graph, which has diminished its utility among his many admirers. Stories are, by definition, based on utterances that combine at the very least a subject (noun) with an action (verb). If each line is defined as a story, asserting that every point in every line so represented, includes both a noun and verb is a tautology. In fact, the very same graph would be more useful – and the metaphor more compelling – if the ‘x-axis’ represented a communicator, and the ‘z-axis’ a place in the world, whether defined locally, regionally, nationally or in some other fashion. In this way, it would move from being a conceit, to something closer to a model of how communication occurs in everyday life.

4 Gregory Bateson is discussed in Norrick (1993) on pages 142–144.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Grady

John Grady is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Wheaton College (Norton, Massachusetts). He is a Past President of the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) and has written extensively on visual research and analysis. He has also co—produced a number of documentary films, including Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston (1979) and Water and the Dream of the Engineers (1983).