But, getting back to the New Yorker: I don't know where it came from --- there's no mailing label on it, and neither I, nor, to the best of my knowledge, do either of my roommates subscribe to it. ... Not that that actually really matters (in this instance). Besides, I've long been curious about this periodical, what with the reputation that it seems to have of being canonical literary fare for the more highbrow echelons of society, so I wasn't as inclined to question this gift horse as I am with other out-of-place phenomena in my super-ordered world. So I flipped through it this morning, as I forked eggs and sausage into my mouth, and had very much the same reaction that I did when I watched my first episode of Seinfeld, nine years ago:
"I don't get it."(Meanwhile, my American cousins, who had scheduled their evening programs around this show and General Hospital, were beside themselves with laughter, much to my bewilderment.) The cartoons, especially --- the famed New Yorker cartoons, of which entire compilations have been separately published in book form... Were they supposed to be funny? Were they supposed to make me laugh? Chuckle? Smirk? All they did was leave me nonplussed --- they didn't really seem to be about anything, other than ho-hum pictorials of ho-hum everyday ordinary life. They weren't funny, in either the mental-doubletake way of the non-sequiturs of Wiley or Douglas Adams, or the droll, understated way of `traditional' British humour, nor were they insightful or thought-provoking like the editorial comics in newspapers, or Time or Newsweek. They were... mundane, and, in the strict sense of its usage in science/mathematics: trivial. So too the few articles that I scanned through, save for one comparing the Presidential-campaign strategies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which, because of its subject matter, actually had some meat to it, and another in which the author described his experiences with driving in China --- which was funny. (And I thought the traffic/road situation in India was bad [Link1, Link2]. *Boy* am I glad I didn't learn to drive in China! Especially considering just how much pleasure I derive from being at the controls of an automobile!) But with these two articles as well, the text simply dragged on and on and on, page after page, as if no such concept as a page- or word-limit existed in the minds of the editors. It is possible, of course, that my reaction is a result of modern society's tendency to require/acquire/desire everything in bite-sized chunks that require a minimum of time to process/parse/digest [I couldn't decide which verb I liked best there], but my personal jury is still out on that question. Granted, this criticism is based on a very limited sample size (a handful of articles from a single issue of the magazine), but I have to say: my first encounter with this journal left me quite disappointed. On the other hand, every time I pick up an issue of Time magazine, or The Economist, or the Style or Editorial sections of the Washington Post, I simply delight in the deftness with which their authors (including the authors of the Letters-to-the-editor) wield their words, play with them, teasing and tickling the mind of the reader, and at how concisely they articulate their thoughts and state their arguments. Of course, exceptions do exist, but that's just it: those are exceptions! If I had the time, my blog would be over-flowing with references to the multitude of gems I've seen in these publications. With the New Yorker, not so. Hence, given all the hype, my state of disappointment.
Then again, it could just be a case of being an acquired taste. It took a while, but Seinfeld eventually did make me laugh. :)
