BEHIND MAGGIE'S STONY FACE
The Press: Paul Johnson has no sympathy with cartoonists baffled by Thatcher
IT HAS long been clear that the cartoon- ists have failed to get the better of Mar- garet Thatcher but I had no idea that she had reduced them to such a state of demoralisation. This fact emerged from a brilliantly entertaining article by Alan Rus- bridger which the Guardian published on 23 July. What a whinging and whining he dutifully recorded! With one exception they all admitted they did not know what to do about her. The odd man out was the Guardian's own Steve Bell, who boasted, `I really like to put the boot in,' and claimed the correct response to Thatcher (his) is 'foaming rage'. Cartoonists who foam with rage and use their boots instead of their brains are unlikely to be effective. I look at Bell's work occasionally and I Imagine that unless you are actually a member of the howling Left it has no impact at all. He is a throwback to the Stone Age and ought to live in a cave drawing fake Picassos on the walls; perhaps he could have made a good job of Vercingetorix, Caractacus or even Boadicea. The rest of his colleagues, de- spairing, characteristically blame not them- selves but Thatcher: it is her lack of humour, they argue, which makes their pens fail.
In fact there are two reasons why the cartoonists cannot handle Thatcher. First, they are just not good enough. Most of them are products of art schools during a Period when drawing had ceased to be taken seriously. Sheer drawing capacity gives an added dimension of freedom in formulating a strategy of attack on a difficult subject. A draughtsman of genius like David Low or even a very competent one like Vicky could make a dull idea exciting or a good one superlative by bravura execution. The sense of humour of the subject is totally irrelevant: look at what Low did with Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain, neither of whom could see the point of a joke. Peel, the political forebear Thatcher most resem- bles, lacked humour too and knew it, making pathetic attempts to learn bawdy stories to tell the lads; but one doesn't find the cartoonists of the 1840s complaining on that account. Cartoonists also need to work hard, spending long hours at the Commons and producing countless studies of their sub- jects in all moods and postures. One reason Vicky got to the top of his profes- sion was that he worked harder than any other man I have come across. Among other things, he took the trouble to learn a great deal about the personalities (as opposed to just the appearance) of politi- cians.
The best by far of the present generation of political cartoonists, Nick Garland of the Independent, has an inventive visual wit which in some ways is as good as Vicky's — I have a drawing of his at home which makes me laugh, without fail, every time I look at it — but to judge by what he said to Rusbridger about Thatcher he knows very little about her and is not in the market for learning more. There is no substitute for industry. In cartooning knowledgeable detail is crucial. The late Mark Boxer, for instance, was often won- derfully successful at getting a likeness. But as a cartoonist he was not in the same league as Obsert Lancaster: his captions lacked punch because he did not listen carefully enough, as Lancaster did, to capture the precise nuances of upper-class vernacu- lar, nor did he possess Lancaster's fanatical concern with the exact particulars of dress and interiors.
The second and chief reason cartoonists are baffled by Thatcher is that she is a woman. They are a very masculine lot. I suspect that many of them simply cannot get used to the idea of a woman running the show. I notice that Rusbridger did not interview Posy Simmonds, who has broken into the male-dominated cartoonist's world to become our outstanding social satirist (she draws better than any of the men too). Posy would have had some interesting points to make about the Thatcher Prob- lem. To begin with, it is not true that Mrs Thatcher has no sense of humour and never makes jokes. The oft-told tale about the tablets and the pills is pure invention. She does make jokes: I have even heard her make a feminist joke. But her comedy is low-key, sad, a trifle bitter, the stoical humour of a woman who has all her life struggled in a man's world and is now resigned to the stupidity and injustice of it. For her, the best joke of all is beating men on their own chosen territory, the power- game. Naturally men find it hard to get the point of that one. Indeed Thatcher's approach to humour, shared by countless other women, is something most men lack the imagination to understand or even to notice.
We have to remember that, from the beginning, it has been men who have defined what a joke is and what constitutes a sense of humour. They have always set the agenda and decided which areas are suitable for comedy and which are sacred. It is the commonest of all masculine prejudices that women 'have no sense of humour' (i.e., they do not always laugh at jokes tailored for male minds). It has often struck me that when women are polled on what they value most in a man, 'sense of humour' invariably comes top of the list. This is because women's lives are harder and sadder than men's and they need more laughs, though they don't, alas, always get them. It is significant that men at a strip-tease show sit in solemn silence whereas women watching a male strip laugh all the time. For women pleasure and laughter are inseparable.
Until recently women who wanted to get on had to accept the masculine version of humour. Jane Austen learnt from infancy the rules of the game from her clever and adored elder brothers, one reason why her novels amuse men as well as women, though her letters to her sister Cassandra reveal a different dimension of jokes. The most successful women writers of comedy, like Alison Lurie, still follow the old rules, albeit with growing reservations. That is the way they were trained. Nancy Mitford, the funniest woman I ever knew, had instilled into her, in nursery and school- room, the upper-class assumption that a girl's job was to keep the chaps amused. The woman who chaired the Democratic convention in Atlanta, I read, has the reputation of being the best teller of dirty jokes in the States, another instance of ambition forcing a female to bow to masculine rule. But things are changing in the world of jokes, as in every other sphere where women are expanding their power. When Queen Victoria said, 'We are not amused,' she was making, in her own way, a feminist point. So, I think, is Mrs Thatcher when she grimly refuses to laugh at a conference of male speech-writers. The age of exclusively he-man hilarity is drawing to a close and we must prepare for a new one in which women arrange some of the banana-skins and set the booby- traps. When it dawns, the Thatcher sense of humour, or lack of it, may look very different. My advice to our male cartoon- ists is not only to observe the Prime Minister's little ways more closely but to study what it is that makes women laugh and what keeps them stony-faced.
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