One thing you learn as you plod through life is that humor is probably the most important of the human senses. I've noticed, for example, that dictators, executioners and religious fanatics all lack any ability to appreciate humor. My father once argued in a lecture that God must have a sense of humor, because there was simply no other explanation for the hippopotamus. Most students laughed, but some studiously jotted this down in their notebooks. I've often wondered what happened to this latter bunch. Some of them are probably in Washington, or in Brussels.
One of them may have been the editor of an article about Canadian foreign trade I found on the Web while googling "Chappatte." He had taken the cartoon that appears on page 14 of this book and decided to enlighten serious students of Canadian trade by adding a caption: "Chappatte, like many others, is suggesting that progress in establishing institutions of world governance appear to have slowed following the establishment of WTO." I have to be careful here, because maybe that is what Patrick was suggesting, but somehow I suspect that he is not like those "many others." They write op-ed articles portentously proclaiming that it's high time we take their advice seriously. Patrick invites us to see that it's all vanity.
It's my job at The International Herald Tribune to choose the op-ed pieces and the editorial cartoons that we run. Selecting two cartoons from Chappatte's fertile offerings is what makes the other task possible. His cartoons restore a critical dimension &endash; humor -- to an otherwise very frightening world. They remind us that all that hypocrisy, bigotry, stupidity and pomposity is really pathetic, and even funny.
Laughter may not be the solution to all the world's idiocies, and Chappatte's purpose is not to get you slapping your knee. Sometimes he can even make you sad. But he'll help you move on, and he'll leave you a bit wiser -- at least if you have a sense of humor. Satire is one of mankind's oldest survival tools, especially in coping with overbearing (and humorless) authority. "Under every stone lurks a politician," Aristophanes quipped way back when. Not surprisingly, the political anecdote was the main form of social commentary in the old Soviet Union. And remember how we used to say, "You can't survive in the army without a sense of humor?"
On these pages, Chappatte takes us over the past four years through that other dimension of humor, through "Another World." The cast is familiar &endash; there's George Bush, of course, and Vladimir Putin, and American soldiers, Israeli settlers, Arab potentates, European bureaucrats and all the others who've filled our newspapers and television screens. Yet once you've seen them in Chappatte's world, they take on a whole new dimension. You begin to wonder which world is the "other" one.
"Another
World
2000-2004: Cartoons from the Int'l Herald Tribune"
Globe Cartoon Publisher, Geneva,
October 2004, Page 5