When Aping a Politician as an Ape: Making Sense of Political Caricatures on the Boundaries of Journalism
Chapter, Peer reviewed
Published version
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https://hdl.handle.net/10642/5692Utgivelsesdato
2017Metadata
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Originalversjon
Hornmoen H: When Aping a Politician as an Ape: Making Sense of Political Caricatures on the Boundaries of Journalism. In: Hornmoen H, Fonn BK, Hågvar YB, Hyde-Clarke N. Putting A Face on It. Individual Exposure and Subjectivity in Journalism, 2017. Cappelen Damm Akademisk p. 51-74Sammendrag
Political caricature is a subset of satire that visually exposes and ridicules the foolish
behavior of persons engaged in power struggles in society. Political caricatures have a
strong capacity to provoke and offend. They have provoked politicians to act, and they
have caused public outrage, e.g. when playing with traditionally denigrating ways of
representing politicians as animals. However, caricatures can be difficult to interpret for
audiences, not least when first appearing in social media. Here, their contexts of production
and reception are not as established or stable as in print newspapers, in which they
conventionally accompany commentaries on editorial pages. Drawing on caricature
theory, I argue that readers strengthen their interpretations if they acquire knowledge of
genre characteristics, the type of media the caricatures appear in, the political and cultural
context of the drawings, and the caricaturist. I apply such contexts in analyses of
ape-like caricatures originally presented in different types of media and in different
political-cultural contexts. The caricatures analyzed are: newspaper drawings by South
African caricaturist Zapiro; a cover drawing from French satirical weekly Charlie
Hebdo by Stéphane Charbier (Charb); and drawings by the Norwegian satirical artist
Thomas Knarvik that first appeared on his Facebook site. I find, in particular, that the
genre-distinct features of sympathy, gap and differentiation are useful tools in assessing
how the caricatures meet – or fail to meet – conditions for making sense of them.