Philosophy and cartoon are often compared, tried to bring together with various excuses. However, coming of these two subjects together is like a man going to a formal convocation with frock but with thong sandals. In this metaphor, thong sandals is cartoon of course.
The concept which is called philosophy is dignified, scientific; it never loses seriousness even if it uses humor sometimes. One can write comments of pages about a simple cartoon and think for hours about it. Sometimes he goes much further that even the person who drew that cartoon gets surprised. He makes the cartoonist say ‘Vouw! Did I do this with a couple of lines?’…
The science of philosophy gets its part from cartoon. Tens of thousands of cartoons were drawn about philosophy until today. Let me show an example among them which makes me laugh the most. Selçuk Erdem drew it, two bats are on a tree branch, they are hanging downwards as usual. Next to them, there hangs a photo frame from the same branch. One of the bats says to the other one, ‘This picture is upside down’. The answer of its friend is simple: ‘We can argue that till morning!’
Yes, cartoon makes jokes, it is far from being scientific. It crashes down a whole logic with a couple of lines while it doesn’t feel the necessity of consulting any kind of knowledge. Almost all the meanings given by the philosopher to the cartoon with his thought power is nothing but improvised lines reflected by the cartoonist to the paper infront of him. The faster a cartoon comes out of its creator’s hands, the higher the chance that it shoots the target. We can think about the reflexes of a sportsman in a boxing game. Let us assume that our boxer, between guarding himself against a punch of the opponent and acting afterwards, thinks like this: ‘My opponent uses his left guard and the width of his wings are two meters, if I move to the right fastly to protect myself from his left punch, he will lose his balance, I will finish him with a right punch and an uppercut afterwards’. When he starts to think about these, he is already knockout!
Apart from this, cartoon has a bad power as well as being talismanic. This power is expressed with a long time classic clishe: ‘Cartoon makes you think while making you laugh!’ Philosopher, on the otherwise, makes you think seriously…
Thinking is making mental abilities, moving the acts of researching and questioning. The real danger for the ones who rule our world begins right here, because according to them, starting the people they rule to think and question is a very dangerous act for them!
The only common thing of philosophy and cartoon shows itself in this point: The act of frightening! The thing is, which one is more scary: Cartoon or philosophy? I think cartoon is more dangerous than philosophy as it dares to make jokes about the concept of philosophy.
Let me end with a joke. Two elder women sat on a bench flattering about their grandsons. One of them said, ‘My grandson will be a journalist, he draws cartoons, his cartoons will be on newspapers’ and continued, ‘But I’m afraid, I hear it lately that cartoonists can’t get themselves out of trouble…’ The other woman thougth for a while and then said:
– Is it that important? My grandson will become a doctor of philosophy soon…
– So, what is so dangerous about it?
– Isn’t it dangerous? What if this illness they call philosophy pass on to my grandson!
İzel ROZENTAL
Cartoonist