Behind the Jester's Mask: Canadian Editorial Cartoons About Dominant and Minority Groups 1960-1979 (Heritage) - Softcover

Morris, Raymond

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1487579209 ISBN 13: 9781487579203

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 1989

Synopsis

The editorial cartoon, a daily diversion for millions of Canadians, strikes most of its readers as irreverent, outspoken, iconoclastic. The reality, as Raymond Morris demonstrates, is more complex.
Morris examines the form and content of Canadian editorial cartoons of the 1960s and 1970s that concerned relations between French and English Canadians and between Canada and the United States.
He argues that since the advent of the monopoly press and the professional, politically neutral artist, cartooning has subtly changed from low satire of the paper’s political opponents to medium satire directed against the current government. Cartoons generally portray politics as a hive of squabbling, waste, and folly; business, while portrayed much less often, is shown as a hive of rational, beneficial productivity. Cartooning is thus often based on an imaginary opposition, a double standard which sells the virtues of corporate decision-making at the expense of democracy as seen in the capitalist state.
Cartoons generally depict scenes in which the social order valued by the cartoonist’s own group (say English Canadians) is being threatened by either a dominant (American) or a minority (Quebecois) group. The threatened group is usually unable to maintain the old order, and is accordingly depicted as fools or victims.

About this title

About the Author

RAYMOND N. MORRIS is professor of sociology at York University. He is the author of Urban Sociology and The Sixth Form and College Entrance and co-author of The sociology of Housing with J.M. Mogey, and of Three Scales of Inequality with C.M. Lamphier. He has contributed articles to a number of professional journals in Canada, Britain, and the United States.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1487579209
• ISBN 13: 9781487579203
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240