In 2002, I drew a six-panel political cartoon titled “Israel vs. Palestine: Where Do You Stand?” Each panel shows a different speaker making a statement about the conflict, with a bold label underneath that sarcastically identifies the speaker’s supposed position. In the first panel, a man labeled “MODERATE HONEST BROKER” says, “The Arab killers must be killed before they get the chance to kill.” Next, another man says, “It’s always sad when innocent women and children die, but hey—that’s war!” Then a woman identified as a “GARDEN-VARIETY ANTI-SEMITE” says, “i can’t help noticing that Israel kills more Palestinians than vice versa.” The labels escalate, culminating with a person called “THE LIVING INCARNATION OF ADOLF HITLER” saying, “Surely Israel could find a better way to keep itself safe?”
The cartoon’s joke is that any statement short of a blank-check endorsement of the IDF is recast as anti-Semitic. At the time of publication, reaction was predictable: supporters of Israel disliked it; those who criticize Israel liked it. I took the usual heat from the usual haters.
I recently reposted this cartoon, along with others from decades past, to my X and Facebook accounts. This time, as John Hiatt might say, things got strange.
Supporters of Palestine became angry. “Your comment is short-sighted, disingenuous, reactionary,” one “friend” barked. “Public figures such as you defending the Zionist project under the ‘Greater Israel’ mandate is certainly grist for Jew hatred,” another complained. Bear in mind, I have never supported Israel. I have always been on Team Palestine. I have drawn hundreds of cartoons along those lines—and caught abuse for it.
Hate me if you must, but not for the wrong reasons. So I added a comment to my 2026 re-post pointing out that my 24-year-old cartoon was dripping in sarcasm. It was depressing, I sighed, how many people missed that.
Someone responded to my clarification with the following: “The fact that media literacy is down so far that: 1. Next to no one identified this as sarcasm. 2. A good majority genuinely believe that the statements made in the comic align with the titles. 3. The people that disagree with the statements and the titles but did not identify the sarcasm and therefore are interacting with the post as if it were made in earnest.”
Others cited Poe’s Law.
Another person added: “I think it’s also a sad expression of how over-the-top Israeli propaganda has become that people are accustomed now to seeing arguments nearly this hyperbolic made seemingly in earnest.”
All excellent points.
There is an additional contributing factor: the systemic debranding of news and editorial content has radically increased decontextualization, making it far more difficult for people to understand what they are reading and seeing.
When I started in national syndication 35 years ago, the media landscape was obviously different. Now, when you come across a cartoon, the odds are that it is on social media, just one of a myriad of unrelated items in an infinite scroll. Many times the artist’s signature is missing or illegible. When the creator’s name is discernible, you probably do not recognize it.
In other words, the cartoon stands on its own. You do not know the cartoonist’s previous work, so you cannot compare the latest piece with what came before. Nor do you know the publication that originally ran it, which might have given you a hint of its political orientation: The Atlantic, thus corporatist/Democratic. Jacobin, thus Bernie progressive. There are no helpful labels such as “this cartoon was drawn by a liberal Democrat.”
You don’t know the author, you don’t know where they’re coming from. Like my French mom used to say, it arrives comme un cheveu sur la soupe—like a hair on your soup. Randomly, unexpectedly, devoid of context.
Until the advent of the internet in the 1990s, that same cartoon would have run in the same position on the page, day after day, week after week, in the same newspaper. There was usually a byline. Whether it was a cartoon or a movie review, you developed a sense of its creator’s point of view over time. You knew where the cartoonist was coming from ideologically, tonally, generationally.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of contextualization in a reader’s ability to digest and understand content properly. A regular viewer of “At the Movies” with Chicago newspaper movie critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, for example, would eventually notice that Ebert had more establishmentarian tastes than the edgier Siskel. So if Ebert, who generally disliked horror movies, gave a thumbs-up to one, it was notable.
That was the world in which I drew the aforementioned cartoon in 2002. Even though I was not on staff at a paper, the syndication clients that ran it tended to run me regularly in the same spot in the same publications.
Writing in Slate in 2012, Simon Doonan argued that “Sarcasm relies heavily on verbal delivery and face-to-face contact,” but sardonic humor in plain old text, no emojis to signal “warning: humor ahead,” used to be plentiful and easily grokked by all but the dimmest. Many of my papers were alternative weeklies whose sophisticated cartoons and writing deeply imbued with Gen X’s love of irony. As years passed, I developed a relationship with the readers. Without ever reading or watching an interview with me, they learned that I was to the left of the Democratic Party and that, among many other things, I was critical of the state of Israel and the way it treated Palestinians.
So when my readers—my regular readers, who knew who I was—saw that cartoon, they knew where I was coming from. Clearly, I was being sarcastic. Nobody, whether Zionist or anti-Zionist, thought or could have thought that my cartoon was pro-Zionist. People understood the point.
For the foreseeable future, we are not returning to a media model in which people subscribe to trusted media name brands and develop close relationships with those brands and their content creators. This leaves those of us who communicate with the public facing a choice.
We can be didactic to a fault, stating everything literally in the simplest possible vocabulary and grammatical constructions imaginable. Or we can wield irony, sarcasm and more sophisticated literary devices while necessarily taking the risk that we will be repeatedly misunderstood. There are workarounds, such as signaling sarcasm with internet-era markers like “/s,” though those gimmicks merely serve up didacticism in a thin veil of sophistication. In 2014 Facebook tested a “satire tag” because posts like those from The Onion kept getting taken seriously, but decided against it—or maybe they just were being sarcastic.
What happens next? Writing and other forms of expression become stupider. Or the marketplace of ideas generates an ingenious solution, such as automatically labeling the ideological leanings of a cartoonist based on their catalogue of previous content.
I don’t like the odds.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)
