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On the Cultural Meaning of The New Yorker ‘Lawyer Cartoon:’ An Experiment in Ethnography of Communication

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Abstract

This essay concerns itself with the Lawyer cartoon, a thematic subgenre of the “The New Yorker Magazine” cartoon, which focuses on the legal profession in the US context. An examination of the cultural meaning of this phenomenon is carried out on the strength of ethnography of communication, which discloses the cartoon as a cultural, social and rhetorical artifact. Among the findings of this study are the structural components, functions, and the rules of configuring the Lawyer cartoon toward it becoming a matter of “risibility” as well as a matter of cultural symbolism. By presenting the attorney as an abnormal character with excessive and hypocritical characteristics, the Lawyer cartoon points to the ascriptions of a disrupted self, making the profession appear as fundamentally inauthentic.

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Notes

  1. I exclude comics from this list as representatives of a mixed genre characterized by sequentially produced imagery.

  2. In this respect, the typology of the basic research themes and accents for ethnography of communication developed by Donal Carbaugh in his 1989 article “Fifty Terms for Talk: A Cross-Cultural Study” is a valuable resource.

  3. The emphasis on ‘self’ are echoed by Carbaugh [7] and Rosaldo [27]. The study of the Illongot’s speech acts makes the latter claim that the process of self and other constitution allows one “to be judged” in the culture-specific terms of “the sincerity, integrity, and commitment actually involved in his or her bygone pronouncements” (Rosaldo [27]: 218).

  4. In his exemplary analysis of lying as a speech activity that accompanies the event of dog trading, Bauman identifies two cultural figures, the hunter and the trader, to be “major exponents of the widely noted (though not exclusively) American predilection for expressive lying” ([3]: 32).

  5. The term ‘comism’ is a direct translation from Propp, that is, the Russian language, and since there is no viable alternative for its meaning, except for the awkward ‘comic,’ I see a good reason to retain Propp’s term as operational.

  6. The latter were celebrated by a publication of the centennial anniversary titled The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker (2004). The volume was accompanied by two compact disks that contained 68, 647 cartoons in total. All the cartoons represented in this paper were reproduced from this original collection.

  7. In this respect, one could recollect an episode of Seinfeld, a US TV sitcom show staged in New York City, where one of the key protagonist, Elaine Benise, is so infuriated by being unable to understand the humor of an ‘animal cartoon’ published in The New Yorker that she makes sure that she visits the editor, who, as it turns out, does not understand the cartoon either; yet, he still chose to publish it because he found it ‘kinda cute and funny.’

  8. In the Hymes typology, the setting is complemented by the addresser and verbal message [15].

  9. This rough statistics is based on the computer –aided evaluation of the total of the lawyer cartoons accessible on the electronic medium (2 DVD diska) supplemented to The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker (2004).

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  1. Institut für Philosophie, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Alexander V. Kozin

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Kozin, A.V. On the Cultural Meaning of The New Yorker ‘Lawyer Cartoon:’ An Experiment in Ethnography of Communication. Int J Semiot Law 28, 801–823 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-014-9399-0

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