Cartoon © Nick Newman

By Nick Newman and courtesy of The Spectator. 

Of the many challenges facing cartoonists – rejection, money, drink or lack of – one of the trickiest is the growing pressure to depict diversity. Readers increasingly write to publications complaining about the lack of ethnic minorities in drawings and demand that cartoons be more inclusive.

We’re trapped in a bad political cartoon, walking a tightrope above a minefield. The problems are manifold. A quick survey of my colleagues in the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation highlighted the following: cartoons involve laughing at someone – if that person is black, you risk appearing racist; including a BAME character in the background smacks of tokenism – ‘background box-tickers’ ; including any minority in a cartoon can confuse the reader – implying the cartoon is about race; including ethnic minorities can inadvertently politicise the cartoon; at the end of the day, it’s safer to have make the butt of the joke pale, male and stale.

Gag cartooning is about speed and recognition. Stereotypes are a form of visual shorthand designed to get an idea across quickly. The French? Man in stripey shirt. Teacher? Mortar board. German? Fat man with sausage. Cartoons amplify for comic effect – which runs the real risk of promoting race hate when depicting BAME characters. PCO Chairman Clive Goddard says, ‘I draw a lot of idiots saying daft things and don’t want any accidental inference that it is because of their race.  Better to stick to white idiots than be misunderstood.’ UK cartoonists themselves are predominantly white, which makes any joke about ethnicity feel awkward, or patronising. Cartoonists may be cowards, but they are not afraid to admit to their cowardice in avoiding the issue.

Cartoonists’ drawing styles present another problem. Many feature characters with big noses – leading to accusations of anti-semitism. One political cartoonist has been told to reduce the size of all middle eastern noses. Attempts to make cartoon characters more diverse can be tricky .Kathryn Lamb likens ‘inking in’ her normal cartoon faces to ‘blacking up’.

For caricaturists whose stock-in-trade is exaggeration, the problem is, ironically, more exaggerated. Morten Morland says that whenever he draws Dianne Abbott or Priti Patel someone invariably complains. ‘But it’s usually because they disagree with the cartoon itself,’ says Morland, ‘and need something to hit back with. So by hinting that the caricature is racist they aim to discredit the whole cartoon.’

In 2018, a caricature of Serena Williams by Australian cartoonist Mark Knight of the Herald Sun was reported to the Australian Press Council for depicting her with ‘large lips, a broad flat nose… and [being] positioned in an ape-like pose’ while throwing a tantrum on court. The National Association of Black Journalists said the caricature was “unnecessarily Sambo like” and even JK Rowling weighed in on social media, tweeting, ‘Well done on reducing one of the greatest sportswomen alive to racist and sexist tropes’. In February 2019 it was cleared of racism by the press watchdog, but it divided opinion among cartoonists themselves. Black cartoonist Mengitsu Etim told the BBC, ‘ At the root of this is the harmful, and downright outrageous way that blacks were sketched. It was a centuries-long smear campaign to dehumanise blacks.’ Others, such as the Metro’s Guy Venables argue ‘it is merely an accurate caricature because she does, in fact, have lovely full lips.’ Says Venables, ‘We’re not here to change the world. We’re here to hold a mirror up to it.’

Accusations of racism in cartoons stretch back to Gillray and beyond. The Georgian cartoonists depicted Africans as threatening and comical, with grotesque features and appetites. Cruikshank’s ‘The New Union Club’ (1818) is one of the most racist prints of the 19th century, depicting a debauched dinner held at the African Institution and attacking abolitionists such as Wilberforce.  Two hundred years later Hergé was censured for his depiction of black characters in Tintin Au Congo, in which Africans are portrayed as simple, childlike and uncivilised. It prompted the Commision for Racial Equality to call for it to be withdrawn from sale in 2007. Meanwhile the New York Public Library locked its copy away. Says the FT’s Jeremy Banx, ‘Tintin in the Congo is a racist book. But Hergé was on a long journey, from King Leopold II to the Beatles, in which he ended up in a very different place to where he started.’ Hergé himself referred to his flawed early books as ‘youthful sins.’

Asterix too is guilty of stereotyping. In 2018 the Pickering Public library in Durham – along with several schools boards – was asked to withdraw Asterix books featuring what one parent called ‘a blackface from a minstrel show’. The Library kept the books in its collection to defend intellectual freedom and offer diversity of opinion.
There are lessons to be learned from history. In 1925 a glib cartoon by David Low portrayed England cricket’s run machine Jack Hobbs as a colossus compared with figures from history, including Caesar, Charlie Chaplin and a caricatured Mohamet. It led to rioting in Calcutta. Today, a cartoon of the Prophet is likely to get you cancelled – permanently.

Now, we live in an age of snowflake sensitivities. As cartoonist Ken Pyne says, ‘The  problem anyone making a living out of humour has these days  is dealing with people who take offence on other people’s behalf – which often takes the form  of loony online abuse from people who have an insincere , self-serving opinion to get themselves  on breakfast television.’ Freelancer Royston Robertson avers ‘Maybe us white blokes should leave jokes about black people and women to cartoonists who are black or female. Cartooning is a notoriously white and male profession so a change in the diversity of those drawing the cartoons would be real progress.”

Until then, cartoonists agree on the need to promote diversity. Says cartoonist Giles Pilbrow, ‘If cartoons are going to stay relevant they must reflect the diversity of modern Britain, so it’s really important that all cartoonists include ethnic minorities in their drawings wherever the jokes are not open to misinterpretation.’ Grizelda points out that cartoonists ARE more inclusive when drawing inclusive worlds – such as the NHS or education . But the complications are endless. Diversity itself is becoming a dirty word, suggesting ‘diverging from the white mean’. Meanwhile ‘inclusive’ is said to imply whites doing the including. For ‘black’ we should now apparently say ‘global majority.’

Faced with such complexities, cartoonists have a dilemma. As the Sun’s Steve Bright says, ‘ You’re  damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If you don’t, you’re racist on the grounds of exclusion. If you do, unless there’s a perfect balance, you’re accused of tokenism, which is also racist. And if you achieve that mythical perfect balance – you’d have to draw 100 people in every cartoon, and colour them according to percentages of population – you’re obsessive, and quite possibly insane.’

Unfortunately, deconstructing cartoons sucks all the fun out of them. As the great Barry Cryer says, ‘Analysing comedy is like dissecting a frog. Nobody laughs and the frog dies.’ But it’s clear that cartoonists are caught between a rock and a hard place. The fact is, the issue just isn’t black and white.

This article first appeared in the 11 Sept 2021 issue of The Spectator

You can see Nick interviewed about this piece on  The Spectator’s Youtube channel. Bonus points to Nick for sporting a PCO badge.