Charlie Hebdo

On Jan. 7, 2015, three radical Islamic terrorists killed 12 people at the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The shootings were allegedly in response to cartoons satirizing the prophet Muhammad. The newspaper’s cartoons regularly satirized Christian, Jewish and Islamic religious figures. The shooters killed four well-known political cartoonists, the editor-in-chief, three staff members, two police officers and two bystanders, before being fleeing. They shot dead five more people before being killed by French police Jan. 9, 2015.

By Rob Pudim

Guest Perspective by Larson Newspapers’ Longtime Editorial Cartoonist

I think of myself as the guy who writes letters to the editor with a lot of exclamation points and question marks coupled with inappropriate capital letters.

The difference is, I draw my “letters” to the editor. I am a sort of ink-stained, self-ordained preacher with a drawing board as a pulpit. I just let my prejudices hang out, stick my tongue out at people and things, and I hope to make people think and/or smile.

I do not believe in dying or killing for a cause or an idea; I leave that to adolescents. I do believe in living for a cause. This is the first thing I want to say about the Charlie Hebdo killers.

I also do not think of myself as heroic or even artistic. If the truth be told, cartoons are the most useless and anti-intellectual feature of modern journalism and is nothing more than a wisecrack, reducing a complex problem to a one-liner. It moves the blood, the emotions, not the mind.

I and my cartoonist colleagues are wiseguys, we’ve got no respect: nobody or thing is sacred. It doesn’t bother us at all.

Monotheism, it does not matter which one — Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — leaves no room for jokes or a sense of humor and I have thought for a long time that is what is wrong with it. It leaves no room for critical thinking, the free expression of opinion or fun. Muhammad was just a man who received a message from God to relay to others. He never said he was God. That’s the second thing I want to say to the Charlie Hebdo killers.

That said, one of the few ways in dealing with the appalling explosions of hatred and mass violence that disgrace our world is humor.

Humor and comedy allow us to step back from the tragedies of the world, get some psychic distance from it and gain control.
If you can laugh at it, you have it under control. Humor can lift life’s problems, push them, flatten them and blast them into clumps and atoms.

Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.

I would go crazy if I treated the world seriously. I do what I do to stay sane — although friends have claimed that if I got too sane, I’d be out of a job.

I like to think doing a cartoon is my tolerant smile at the mutability of things and the many-footed man-swarm passing my door. I also know it is the best way to handle the bad stuff. Cartoons create a mood or an expectation by their exaggerated and simple way that things can be said that are serious without being too serious.

In short, it is possible for good things to be considered and happen. Cartoons are a way to say important things in a way regular writers aren’t, say in a regular way — or, if they are, it is so regular and balanced nobody reads it.

Humor allows you to roll with life’s punches and stupidity rather than be knocked down by them. You may not be able to change what goes on around you, but you can react to it with humor and in an uncertain world, there’s a certain comfort in that.

Cartoonists operate in a two-level world. The world “as is” and the world “as if”.

In the world “as is” apathy, greed, anger and fear run things along with a sprinkling here and there of faith, hope and love.

In the world “as if” people are tolerant, you are judged by the content of your mind, bureaucracies are responsive to people, laws are made for the benefit of others, all that good stuff.

Cartoons get their tension from that dichotomy, we criticize the world “as is” in order for it to become the world “as if”.

So cartoonists are not pessimists, they are optimists. They actually believe, if they can get your attention with a joke or a wise-crack over the din of advertising and other claims to your attention, that you will care and change they way things work.

The third thing I want to say to the Charlie Hebdo killers is they did not accomplish what they intended, they failed.

Mary Pettibone Poole once said, “He who laughs, lasts.”

Rob Pudim has been Larson Newspapers’ award-winning professional cartoonist since Sept. 20, 1989. Pudim began working as a cartoonist at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1964.