By Donald Kaul
Guest Commentary

Like many New Yorker readers, I was disappointed at the magazine’s cover depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as Muslim terrorists. The Wall Street Journal carries sharper satire than that.

I am old enough to remember a time when “New Yorker” cartoons were funny, witty, at least amusing. This one wasn’t any of those things.

It was instead an amateurish attempt to caricature the Right Wing’s clumsy attempts to caricature the Obamas as dangerous, secret radicals. A caricature of a caricature is a difficult trick to pull off and the New Yorker didn’t.

It’s all part of a truly disturbing trend, the decline of sophisticated humor in our society in general and the New Yorker in particular.

It’s still a great magazine, don’t misunderstand me, it’s just not funny anymore. Once home to James Thurber and S.J. Pearlman, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker – wits who could make an idea sparkle – it has become the headquarters of sober political discourse. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course – it still contains some of the best writing found anywhere – but I miss the laughs.

The same thing has happened to the movies. Romantic comedies were once the province of William Powell and Myrna Loy, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, Spenser Tracy and Katherine Hepburn – adults who talked smart in a way that put a smile on your face. You grew up wanting to be like those people.

Today the typical romantic comedy features a loser who’s extending his adolescence into his late twenties hooked up with a vapid blonde who is nice but clueless.

So come on, New Yorker, you’re letting the team down. If we can’t depend on you to provide smart, sophisticated humor where can we turn?

Politics, maybe. Really, the question of the day isn’t why people aren’t making better jokes about Obama; it’s why John McCain is being taken seriously at all. His entire campaign is an exercise in unintentional humor.             

For example, he began to runs ads in late July accusing Obama of not having been to Iraq at the very moment that Obama was in Iraq talking to leaders there. Is that great comic timing or what?

Then a McCain spokesman followed up by calling Barack’s current trip “a campaign rally overseas,” as if he shouldn’t have done it.

And no sooner had McCain said that Obama had gone with his mind closed to any new facts he might be exposed to, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, publicly supported Obama’s plan to withdraw most of our troops within 16 months.

Finally, there was Al Gore, whom George Bush likes to deride as “ozone man,” saying the United States should set a goal of producing “100 percent” of our electricity from renewable sources –things like the sun, wind and geothermal energy – within 10 years.

Well, you can imagine the fun the McCain people – who favor drilling offshore, on-shore and between the shores – had with that.

However, within a few days Texas regulators had approved a $4.93 billion wind-power transmission project that will be able to provide enough electricity for 3.7 million air-conditioned homes on a hot day.

Texas. Home of George Bush, the oil president.

Let me tell you something, if Texas gets the joke, it’s time the rest of us did too.

Donald Kaul is a former Washington correspondent. His e-mail is This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Article distributed by MinutemanMedia.org.