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Popular Culture Review
of nearly 10%. The Democrats would not regain power for 12 years until Bill
Clinton’s victory in 1992.
The severest criticism of the Carter presidency came from the newspaper
press, in particular, cartoonists. As a visual medium, part of the joke was
depicting Carter as a dwarf with giant lips, but the cartoons usually parodied
what was seen as Carter’s vacillation or ineffectiveness. After the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan, Carter was pictured as a Pollyanna “holding a deed to
the Brooklyn Bridge that is signed by Leonid Brezhnev. The shocked Carter is
saying, ‘You mean he lied to me?”’6 In another, a tiny Carter appears in an ant
costume for a stage play, reduced to an insignificant role by his press secretary,
while Ted Kennedy plays a grasshopper.7 Other cartoonists played on his
supposed penchant for obfuscating, depicting Washington saying, “I cannot tell
a lie,” Nixon saying, “I cannot tell the truth,” and Carter saying, “I cannot tell
the difference.”8
Yet these quips were exceptions in the campaign of 1980. Apart from the
National Review's more erudite audience, much of the media parodied not the
candidates’ issues or actions, but their personal tics, the pseudo-satire based on
personality which Patterson criticizes. Much of the spoofing was not really satire
of the person or his politics, but rather riffing on comedic stereotypes. Ted
Kennedy was introduced as “the senator from Pizza Hut.”9 Gerald Ford was a
one-joke character on Saturday Night Live where Chevy Chase would play him
tripping and falling in the pool. In my childhood in the early 80s there was a
Canadian cartoonist named Ed Uluschak, and I remember that any panel set in a
prison always had Nixon’s nose peeking through the bars. During a canoe ride in
April 1979, Carter reported that he was attacked by a swamp rabbit, which he
struck with a paddle. The event suggested weakness; a biographer noted that
Carter “had to deal with Russia and the Ayatollah and here he was supposedly
fighting off a rabbit.”10 Yet the incident exploded into a running gag having less
to do with Carter than with Monty Python. A Washington Post cartoon followed
imitating a movie poster for Jaws, with the legend Paws.
One learns what life in 18th century London was like by reading Pope. Good
satire exposes reality. The purpose of much election humor in 1980, however,
was to invoke laughter. Much of the lampooning is what Mikhail Bakhtin would
call, in his work on Rabelais, the carnival style of folk humor. A medieval
European festival day often involved parodies of secular or religious authority
figures, and the church usually distinguished between something done “in emest
or in pley,” as Chaucer would say. Some written humor was biting, such as Jules
Feiffer’s cartoons on Nixon and Reagan, but much was playful teasing. In one
Saturday Night Live sketch Carter guest-hosts a call-in show and a caller needs
help with his acid trip;11 the joke is in the situation and not specifically on
Carter. A Johnny Carson skit with Reagan also makes fun of Secretary of the
Interior James Watt’s name as Reagan misunderstands ‘Watt’ and exercising at
‘the Y’ in a “Who’s on First” spoof which is only tangentially about Reagan.12
Although Bakhtin is speaking about medieval Europe, these “comic verbal