We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons By Sam Gross Simon & Schuster March 2008, $20, pp. 128

That Hilarious Old Swastika

The swastika is not inherently funny, yet humor often comes in unexpected and incongruous forms. Squeezing jokes out of the ancient sign and Nazi logo may prompt chuckles from some, but there is also considerable risk in making this brand of state-sanctioned criminality the butt of wit, lest it offend. It also raises the question whether the time is right or will ever be right to do so. Sam Gross, a hilarious cartoonist whose work appears frequently in the New Yorker (his cartoon of an amputated frog leaving a French restaurant, lying on a gurney with the sign “Special: Frogs Legs,” which ran in the National Lampoon in the 1980s, is still etched in my memory) has decided to take the risk with a new collection of swastika cartoons, We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons.

Disappointingly, the risk is not worth the reward.

While a few cartoons are mildly amusing, Gross has done little more than produce sight gags, many of which are so lame (like a Nazi feeding a goose-stepping goose) and contrived (like a man pulling out a sofa-bed with a mattress shaped like a swastika), they are the visual equivalent of chalk on the blackboard. If his intent was to reclaim the ancient hooked cross and take the onus off the mark the Nazis put on it, or extend the ongoing debate over whether the swastika should be reviled or revived, he has accomplished little more than exploit emotions that for some people are still quite raw.

Which is not to say that the swastika—or for that matter the Nazi era in general—is beyond the reach of satirists (e.g. Mel Brooks’s The Producers, and its memorable dance number, Springtime for Hitler.) In 1946 Saul Steinberg’s cartoon showing der Fuehrer trying to draw different iterations of the swastika on a wall spoke volumes about the failure of the Third Reich and its leadership. An earlier acerbic collection of graphic swastika satires by Boris Artzybasheff and published in Life magazine made vividly clear that by transforming the sign into tools of torture the Nazis were unabashedly evil. Gross’ cartoons randomly poke fun at Nazi lore (a Nazi wearing an armband having breakfast while looking at a milk carton with Hitler’s picture under the title “Missing”) or the shape of the swastika (a goose-stepping, arm-raised mouse entering a swastika maze).

Gross’ cartoons do not ask important questions about the nature of signs and symbols, which is inherently part of the swastika debate. Not one cartoon raises questions, even as an after-thought, about how such an originally benign sign was so thoroughly transformed into the manifestation of unspeakable terror. And there is quite a history to build upon, too. At least one iteration of the swastika can be found on all the continents and dates back eons; historians have never traced its true origins. Adolf Hitler, who introduced it as the logo of the Nazi Party in 1921, accepted it only as a 19th century German racist/nationalist symbol that stood for Aryan superiority and anti-Semitism. Despite the swastika’s widespread use in Asia, Africa and India, from the moment it became identified with the Nazis its meaning forever changed. So when the Allies occupied Germany the swastika was prohibited from public display except in relation to art or scholarship (the prohibition remains in force today). In recent years so-called “friends of the swastika” have made it their mission to reclaim its meaning as an ancient symbol of good fortune.

None of this history is reflected in Gross’ cartoons, nor should it be. But neither does the gag showing a Nazi eating a sausage that is wearing a swastika or a cat with its butt in the shape of a swastika offer viewers anything to either laugh at or seriously ponder. Trivializing the swastika is surely no felony, but perhaps this book would have best been titled We Have Ways of Making You Wince.

Steven Heller is co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the author of The Swastika: A Symbol Beyond Redemption? and the forthcoming Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State, among other books.