The drawing sent Napoleon into a fury. He instructed Fouché to imprison, without benefit of trial, anyone caught trying to smuggle copies of it into France. He lodged a formal diplomatic complaint against Gillray through his ambassador in London and vowed that if he were ever to succeed in invading England, he would personally go looking for the artist. The reaction was characteristic of the Emperor: when negotiating the Treaty of Amiens with England in 1802, Napoleon had attempted to insert a clause stipulating that all British caricaturists who drew him should be treated in the manner of murderers and forgers, who were subject to extradition and prosecution in France. The English negotiators, puzzled by the request, rejected the amendment.
2.
Louis-Philippe and Napoleon would likely not have responded so vehemently if humour were just a game. In fact, as humourists and their targets have long recognised, jokes are an enormously effective means of anchoring a criticism. At base, they are another way of complaining: about arrogance, cruelty or pomposity, about departures from virtue or good sense.
The most subversive comedy of all may be that which communicates a lesson while seeming only to entertain. Talented comics never deliver sermons outlining abuses of power; instead, they provoke their audiences to acknowledge in a chuckle the aptness of their complaints against authority.
Furthermore (the imprisonment of Philipon notwithstanding), the apparent innocence of jokes enables comics to convey with impunity messages that might be dangerous or impossible to state directly. Historically, for example, court jesters could poke fun at royals over serious matters that could never even be alluded to by other courtiers. (When King James I of England, who presided over a notoriously corrupt clergy, had trouble fattening up one of his horses, Archibald Armstrong, the court fool, is said to have advised him that all he had to do was make the creature a bishop, and it would rapidly gain the necessary pounds.) Noting the same impulse in his Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious (1905), Freud wrote, “A joke will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously.” Through jokes, Freud suggested, critical messages “can gain a reception with the hearer which they would never have found in a non-joking form … [which is why] jokes are especially favoured in order to make criticism possible against persons in exalted positions.”
James Gillray, The Grand Coronation Procession of Napoleone the 1st Emperor of France, 1805
That said, not every exalted person is ripe for the comic plucking. We rarely laugh, after all, at a doctor who is performing an important surgical operation. Yet we may smile at a surgeon who, after a hard day in the operating room, returns home and tries to intimidate his wife and daughters by talking to them in pompous medical jargon. We laugh at what is outsized and disproportionate. We laugh at kings whose self-image has outgrown their worth, whose goodness has not kept up with their power; we laugh at high-status individuals who have forgotten their humanity and begun abusing their privileges. We laugh at, and through our laughter criticise, evidence of injustice and excess.
At the hands of the best comics, laughter hence acquires a moral purpose, jokes become attempts to cajole others into reforming their character and habits. Jokes are a way of sketching a political ideal, of creating a more equitable and saner world. Wherever there is inequity or delusion, space opens up for humour-clad criticisms. As Samuel Johnson saw it, satire is only another method, and a particularly effectual one, of “censuring wickedness or folly.” In the words of John Dryden, “The true end of satire is the amendment of vices.”
3.
History reveals no shortage of jokes intended to amend the vices of high-status groups and shake the mighty out of their pretensions or dishonesty.
In late-eighteenth-century England, for instance, it became fashionable for wealthy young women to wear colossal wigs. Cartoonists offended by the absurdity of the trend quickly produced drawings that amounted to a safe vehicle for urging these ladies to come to their senses—a message that, as Freud would recognise, would have been risky to convey explicitly, given that the wig-wearers owned, or were related or married to men who owned, large tracts of the realm.
At the same time, a fashion for breast-feeding took hold among high-society women, a group who had never before concerned themselves with babies who now insisted on suckling their infants in order to fit in with progressive notions regarding motherhood. Women who hardly knew where the nursery was in their own house began compulsively exposing their breasts, often between courses at luncheons and dinners. Once again, the cartoonists stepped in to call for moderation.
Engraving from the Oxford Magazine, 1771
James Gillray, The Fashionable Mamma, 1796
By the second half of the nineteenth century, yet another affected habit had seized the English upper classes, whose members took to speaking French, especially in restaurants, to demonstrate their intellect and eminence. The editors of Punch saw in the trend a fresh vice to amend.
Scene- A Restaurant near Leicester Square. Jones. “Oh- er- Garsong, regardez eecee- er- apportez- voo le- la-” Waiter. “Beg pardon. Sir. I dont know French!” Jones. “Then for goodness' sake, send me Somebody who does!”
Illustration from Punch, 1895
A century later in the United States, there was more than enough “wickedness and folly”among Manhattan’s elite to keep the cartoonists of the New Yorker occupied. In business, many chief executives had a new interest in seeming friendly to their employees —seeming being, unfortunately, the operative word here. Instead of changing many of their more brutal practices, they contented themselves with camouflaging them with bland technocratic language, which they hoped might lend some respectability to an exploitation not so very different from that perpetrated by the satanic mills of old. The cartoonists, though, were not fooled. At heart, business remained committed to a starkly utilitarian view of employees, wherein any genuine, rather than ritualistic, talk of those employees’fulfilment, or of their employers’ responsibilities to them, was tantamount to heresy.
Slave galley: “Human resources”
So great were the demands of business that many high-ranking executives, particularly lawyers, permitted the clinically efficient mind-set of their jobs to permeate all areas of their lives, usually at the expense of any spontaneity or sympathy.
“You know what I think folks? What’s important is to be warm, decent human beings… ”