Who Has To Die? Charlie Hebdo’s Earthquake Caricature

“-- this is material for comedy. It is no laughing matter. Nevertheless, I should like to let you know en passant that something of the order of a vast comic dimension in all this has not wholly escaped me.” - Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI

On Monday 6 February 2023 at 7:05 PM, the same day as the tragic Turkey-Syria earthquake, Charlie Hebdo published a caricature that made people gasp from shock, as if the earthquake was not enough.

Before I begin with an analysis of this piece, there’s an important distinction that needs to be made between comedy and laughter. It seems that comedy and laughter got a divorce. What is comic, may not incite laughter anymore, or ever. It may not even exist for the sole purpose of laughter as a legitimizing response. In other words, laughter has ceased to shape what counts as comedy. There is laughter as such: a response or even an act in and of itself that does not chronologically follow the comic. There is an occurrence and then there is laughter. What the occurrence is, is something that steps outside of the boundaries of the comic and the meaning it creates. Laughter is coloring outside the lines. The distinction between comedy and laughter is not a dichotomy. Comedy and laughter exist within each other, because of each other and despite each other. However, it does seem more so than not, in recent years that comedy is not for laughing, and laughing is not for comedy. For the sake of clarity, and to avoid the risk of writing gibberish that makes so much sense to only Me, I borrow from Alfie Bown, in his book In the Event of Laughter, clearer definitions of the two phenomena: laughter points at an occurrence, a happening, while comedy elucidates conventions and ideas.

I want to clarify that my intention in writing a joke analysis regarding this caricature comes with a degree of estrangement from the general outrage that this piece has received. Although I have good spoken French, I had to google translate “chars” just to make sure it means something destructive as I was not sure the direct translation was “tanks”. This is to say that the joke was very predictable, a key feature in visual satire. Written jokes when infused with shock value, unlike spoken ones, require a spoiling element that resides in what is in front of the reader. The spoiler here plays an essential part in the comic value of the piece by establishing the premise and conclusion almost at the same time.

I found interest in this caricature because of its perceived offensive and inhumane nature. I became quite obsessed with it, even a month after the tragic earthquake. This joke, “offensive”, “immoral” and even “shameful” triggers the discourse of outrage, one that is becoming rampant in our virtual interactions in digital spaces where outrage is the default affect emerging as a response to almost everything. With compounded crises and the unbelievability of everything that has been going on (well, some believe it, some have even predicted it), we may forget to gasp at a natural disaster, but we raise our eyebrows almost reflexively at satire that redirects the meaning of the earthquake and how it registers in our symbolic. A joke requires emotion and affect, to emerge and to float. This one emerged out of the imperative of outrage and shock, and to reinforce that imperative, rather than question it.

To give credit where credit is due, the joke works by being a complete failure, another element of its comic value. However, I hesitate in deeming this piece a failure as such, and it definitely is not a success. Juin’s caricature is a bad joke, and even worse, the reason for its lamentability is not because it is insensitive or offensive. The author simply did not do his homework, and this is not entirely contingent, as absence of knowledge, or existence of false knowledge, is a matter of ideology. I elaborate in a few lines.

The comic shows a destroyed location with a vignette on the top right declaring “Séisme en Turquie” or “Earthquake in Turkey”. Below the text, there is a lot of rubble, a car upside down, three buildings still standing, with one looking like it got bit in the middle. Below the illustration, the caption reads “Même pas besoin d’envoyer des chars”, or “Don’t even need to send tanks”. 

The place is obliterated. The need to send tanks to destroy and kill is obsolete. Buildings are on the ground and the people are under them. This seemingly is an important critique and I will go ahead and allow myself to give (more) credit (than is due) to #Juin who is making a decent observation: tanks cause destruction. Foreign military intervention is violent in essence. They don’t promote or uphold peace, they don’t foster democracy or human rights. Tanks are death machines, and they share inevitable death and the confrontation of fragile life, in common with earthquakes, a natural non-negotiable occurrence. Furthermore, the piece points to the imminence of heavy artillery in foreign intervention, a measure the Middle East is well familiar with. It is almost as if the author is saying, albeit completely not knowing it, that, with its rather unpredictable nature, foreign intervention’s violence is as imminent and non-contingent as natural disasters, and it is collateral by excellence. This analogy is sound for many countries that were invaded or that inevitably would. But this begs the question, is the implication made by the author universal? Is foreign intervention imminent and inevitable for all? Absolutely not. In other words, who is going to send tanks to Turkey, a member of NATO? Realistically, that has actually been its job for the past decades, and even centuries as the ghost of empire still haunts its establishment. Did Juin know? It is funny to reach a place in this analysis where I have to inquire about the political knowledge of a satirical cartoonist whose job is to know the facts, the indisputable ones at least. I hesitate as I type this, but there is a possibility that the author thinks Turkey is an Arab third world country, or has assumed its global south status just because it is a muslim country or because it is in the Middle East. This begs another question, has the author heard of Syria? I could ask a million questions about knowledge and intention, but the truth remains: the caricature is a quite interesting comic failure and it illustrates so clearly the ideological assumptions and falsities that satirical cartoonists seem to snort off like cocaine, in order to come up, on the spot, with pieces that generate online traction. I mean, think about the clicks, if the piece was titled “Séisme en Syrie”.

Finally, the piece conveys a fascist message; they’re already dead under the rubble, no need to execute them. Those people’s death is impending, and the place’s demolition is definite. However, the joke fails miserably and comically by making Turkey the subject of the joke, to end up delivering a very reckless punchline, one that is only able to generate short-lived outrage and anger, before the next scroll. The piece is lazy, it sprints to the punchline and completely murders an important idea, one that is powerful enough to be communicated maliciously: we live in a world where someone or something has to do the killing, it doesn't matter who as long as buildings are on the ground and dead bodies are under them.

I would like to end by saying that my argument against the piece isn’t an argument against misinformed political knowledge and satirical work. The thesis I intend to make is one that examines ideologically-charged satire. With the norm being that satirical content creation is inherently transgressive and left-leaning, it ends up being taken for granted to root for the oppressed, marginalized and exploited, against the elites that thrive at their expense. In conveying a righteous message, there is the inauguration of a causal relation that concludes on violence, necropolitics, hypocrisy, fascism, phobias and inequality. Unfortunately, one cannot write a 1000 page essay as the caption of a caricature to relay a nuanced message that establishes a political position or truth. Satire, in its sacrifice of meaning through manipulating language, flirts with a territory of non-truth and positions itself within the realm of interpretation. Therefore, it allows for message and form to exist dialectically, and sometimes even in necessary direct contradiction. The embrace of contradiction, non-truth and nonsense are dictums of comedy. A joke does not end with the punchline. In many ways, this is where it begins. Otherwise, righteous left-leaning satire and comedy, with the objective of exposing the truth and changing the status quo, has prohibited itself of all methods to actually speak, and has left itself with the allowed, filtered out and diluted messages and umbrella terms legitimized with laughter.