Argentina had a vibrant tradition of graphic political humor. From the satires of Caras y Caretas to the irreverence of Humor Registrado, caricature has been a thermometer, a mirror and a hammer. It wasn’t a joke, it was a way of thinking. The reader interpreted, discussed, and took a stand. This tacit pact – irony as freedom – began to fail in 2008 with the prosecution of Hermenegildo Sábat, after Cristina Fernández was left empty-eyed after the legal setback in early December 2012 – an image that is even more relevant today than it was then. The official response expressed no criticism of the work; He tried something worse: he tried to discipline interpretation. It was the moment when power said: “Only the facts that I define exist.” The metaphor came under suspicion.
The Argentine caricature became dangerous. Many cartoonists softened their lines. Meanwhile, the media was shrinking and polarization required immediate support. With the advent of networks, the meme replaced the cartoon. Satire stopped winning by clout. There was no longer any interpretative dialogue, only factions.
The contrast with the United States is telling. There, the humorous tradition never withdrew from the center of the political debate. It is not that power admires irony – no politician enjoys being ridiculed – but that the cultural system assumes that satire is part of the democratic exercise, to the point of being institutionalized. Shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show” became places where politics was turned into comedy. They do not neutralize the conflict: they increase it, but they make it visible. Humor is a mechanism for informal control of power.
Authoritarians don’t like that
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a mainstay of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe that they are the owners of the truth.
In this ecosystem, graphic-political editors are not peripheral commentators, but rather mediators. Chris Britt, Chip Bok, Dana Summers, Gary Makstein, Jeff Danziger, to name a few, express themselves with complete confidence, even disrespect and cruelty. The visual caricature, like that of the Washington Post or the many illustrated editorials of small regional newspapers, maintains a classic role: the exaggeration of the gesture to reveal the content. No one assumes that the drawing “is” reality; Everyone understands his grammar: deforming to interpret.
Of course there are tensions in the USA too. Presidents are irritated, parties are exerting pressure, the audience is becoming radicalized. But political humor there functions as a cultural, almost constitutional counterweight: the right to mock power is daily proof that it is not sacred. When Donald Trump sought to delegitimize comedians and hosts, his crusade didn’t eliminate satire: it turned it into fuel. Parody survives because it can be distributed anywhere—television, podcasts, stand-up comics, digital comics—and because the public expects it to exist.
In Argentina, the cartoon lost this status after the Sábat Kirchner episode. Its content was not discussed, but rather its raison d’être. Without an ecosystem that protects the metaphorical gesture, political humor retreats into inferior formats where the punch is immediate but superficial. In the United States, however, irony is a civic muscle: it is trained in laughter to withstand insults. There the presidents change, but the political cartoons remain. Here we are still learning that freedom is exercised not only in facts but also in interpretations.
Maybe one day we can reclaim that shared reading space. Not to laugh for the sake of laughing, but to remember that power without metaphor is a brick. At least with cartoons we have the opportunity to see where we come from.