On Friday of WikiConference North America in Columbus we had “cultural crawl” day, which is a wiki conference tradition of going to any specialized knowledge center near the conference like a STEM organization, museum, university collection, or whatever is a source of information for developing Wikipedia. I went to the Thurber House, which is a museum for a cartoonist for The New Yorker.
When I first moved to NYC in 2012 Kathryn, my housemate, subscribed to paper issues and they were around the house. I had heard of the magazine before and had checked out issues in the past but I did not then get what it was about. Lots of the magazine was targeted to people in New York City, so why would anyone outside of New York care? I did not get it. Kathryn showed me theatre reviews and listings and that was the first time I realized the large number of big budget, high talent theatre productions which ran concurrently in NYC. I read some articles and realized that many of the features have little to do with New York. They run long nonfiction narratives of various individuals’ personal reflections. They review art and society. Many works in The New Yorker find independent publication.
Everyone knows that the New Yorker publishes these weird cartoons. I do not know how to describe them except to say they are recognizable. These are single panel cartoons. Maybe they are funny but no one would ever laugh at them. Maybe they are intentionally boring humor. This Thurber House is a museum to the memory and work of James Thurber, who drew New Yorker cartoons and wrote New Yorker-style stories from about 1940-60.
I was excited to go to this place because my current housemate, Emmanuel, is a huge fan of the weekly New Yorker cartoon user captioning contest. Our house has a Thursday night tradition of baking pizzas. We make the dough in the morning and in the evening we roll it out as a group, decorate the pizza, and show off whatever weird media we found. Emmanuel makes a big deal about having a group discussion on entering this contest every week, and that everyone has to give a best try at a caption, then collectively we submit one entry. The top three suggestions as ranked by the editor get published on the website, gaining the short-lived resentment of other meetup groups like ours who enter this every week and never get any acknowledgement in return as they read the selected entries. Following this we watch user submitted videos published elsewhere, with the entire weekly event having the theme of two hours of humor which is not funny.
When I took this tour in Columbus the tour guides spent minutes recounting “The Night the Ghost Got In”, which is one of Thurber’s stories. I happened to have read this in advance of visiting the museum because it is one of Thurber’s more famous stories and I wanted to understand a bit about the writer before visiting. The story is about a one-time occurance of an odd creaking noise in the old house which is the museum. The joke, in New Yorker style, is that Thurber’s mother interprets the noise as a ghost or burglar while Thurber as narrator believes that the noise has no particular significance. The New Yorker likes humor and narratives which go nowhere and have no point, and either this old story fit the character of the magazine or it was part of defining it. At the museum I had a meta-New Yorker experience in that the two tour guides were telling the story with an interpretation of the haunting being literally Thurber’s belief or that he wanted to tell a story of spookiness. Either they missed the point of the story, which is more New Yorker style humor, or they intentionally present an obvious misunderstanding of the story, which is another kind of New Yorker style humor.
A local guy named Ben was our guide from the library meetup point to the Thurber House. Ben is a volunteer for WikiTongues, which is the latest hot Wikipedia project in NYC. WikiTongues is seeking to archive videos of every language and dialect for the purpose of language preservation. Their system seeks to sync their cataloging with Wikipedia because Wikipedia’s native software works in more languages than any other platform, and encourages language preservation itself, and is accessible for all kinds of user contributions. There is nothing intentional to read into the WikiTongues representative taking us to a New Yorker museum, but I did reflect on how subtlety of language is so easily lost across any cultural gaps. New Yorker media can be barely funny in English; I wonder what people will think of these cartoons when they are eventually translated into other languages.
Overall ratings: New Yorker is a great magazine and I like all its content even if I do not know why. I would recommend the Thurber House to anyone who likes the New Yorker, and thanks to the city of Columbus for preserving this odd museum. WikiTongues is great and I hope that someday the language preservation it accomplishes can promote the kind of understanding that can make everyone in the world laugh at New Yorker humor.