Sarcasm At The New Yorker

Harold W. Ross launched The New Yorker magazine in 1925 with a prospectus which famously declared "THE NEW YORKER will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about."

Less famously, the advisory board for The New Yorker had been culled from a group known to be the "aristocracy of New York sophistication," the Algonquin Round Table, "a group of exclusive writers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel for witty conversation and companionship."

Perhaps not surprisingly, fifty-one years later the magazine would run as its cover a map (originating from the nineteen thirties) depicting the world as seen from Manhattan's Ninth Avenue, in which the rest of the world pales in size and significance to New York City. Perhaps readers were supposed to recognize Daniel K. Wallingford's map as satire, a comment on the hubris of New Yorkers. But I think the cleverness was lost on most of us rubes somehow inexplicably surviving beyond The Big Apple.

And into this tradition, at the magazine whose founder said "will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers," has stepped the now-infamous Obamas As Muslim Terrorists cover. Editor David Remnick assures Washington Post media critic Howie Kurtz "It's clearly a joke, a parody of these crazy fears and rumors and scare tactics about Obama's past and ideology. And if you can't tell it's a joke by the flag burning in the Oval Office, I don't know what more to say."

Apparently the public, about whom the editor presumably assumes a "reasonable degree of enlightenment," is sufficiently ignorant or bigoted as to necessitate a sophisticated New York publication to lift it up out of its unawareness. And they are surprised, evidently, that many of us did not pick up on this inside joke, so unable to recognize our lack of sophistication as to appreciate the irony, the sarcasm, generously visited upon us by the enlightened souls at The New Yorker. This applies, I suppose, even to the citizens of Dubuque, residents of the state with the highest literacy rate in the nation.

Now, that is what I call irony.