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Schema interviewsWTF? | We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons
Swastikas can be funny? Yes, insists 74-year-old American cartoonist Sam Gross. His new book WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU LAUGH: 120 FUNNY SWASTIKA CARTOONS (Schuster & Schuster, March 2008) uses the swastika as the focus of jokes. The goal was both to take the power out of the swastika and also to be funny, he said.
During a radio interview with Q, Gross said the idea for the book came from a news story about vandalism where a boy in suburban New York drew swastikas on garage doors. Gross realized: "The symbol is held in such awe and terror. I just got so angry that I decided to have fun with it."
One cartoon shows a vandal who has just painted a swastika on a wall and a dog saying, "Try scent marking. It's nicer."
The swastika has been around for thousands of years, primarily in Hindu culture (and the reverse swastika is used as a symbol to denote a temple on maps in Asia), but has since been associated with Hitler and the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, people have accused Gross of trivializing the Holocaust in his latest drawings, but he says: "I'm not trivializing the Holocaust. I'm trivializing the swastika. The swastika is not the Holocaust. The swastika is a symbol." Hmm, you decide.
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