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David Turgeon on the Potentil Anti-Semitic Nature of the Serge Chapleau Cartoon
posted June 26, 2007
 

Seems to me that Chapleau's cartoon reflects his own sentiment on the opportunistic nature of Mario Dumont (the politician being depicted) rather than any sort of bias against the Jewish community.

It's too bad your copy of the cartoon is so small, one can't read the talk bubble whereas it's actually where its whole meaning lies. Here is a full translation [my comments in brackets] for your anglophone readers:

- The newspaper title says: "Mario Dumont courted by the Jewish community [of Montreal]"

- Mario Dumont says: "Next week, I'm being courted by nude cyclists from the Plateau [a hip neighbourhood in Montreal], don't miss that!"

I understand it's easy to take the depiction out of context if, for example, you can't read French, or don't know who Mario Dumont is. It seems to me that the simple absurdity of the joke (imagining Dumont riding a bicycle in the nude) deflates any sort of "racism" that might be detected at the very first glance. In fact, the cartoon seems to me to be very similar to the "Hillary Clinton making a fool of herself speaking like an African-American" jokes we've seen and heard in the last months. (And I wouldn't be surprised if someone outside the US who didn't follow that story would find THOSE jokes offensive.)

So I can see some people feeling rubbed the wrong way (because they didn't go past the first glance, can't read French, or are unfamiliar with Quebec politics) but overall, this seems to me a far more absurdist and good-natured joke than its commentators make it to be, and very much in spirit with the great tradition of political humour in Quebec, a tradition which has never placed politically correctness as its core virtue, for better and for worse. (Now that I think of this, maybe a simple knowledge of Danish humour might have defused much of the outrage about the Danish cartoons.)

(And believe me, I know this whole issue is a bottomless can of worms so I wouldn't even bother to comment if I didn't personally think the cartoon perfectly innocuous and even quite funny.)