The metaphysics of humor A look at a. Garzón’s cart oons

Abstract

Mr. Garzon’s drawings, published and titled Cartoons by the newspaper El Espectador, are indeed a philosophical caricature, a sketch of the human soul, quite different from the classical political cartoon by his contemporary Mr. Osuna. Garzon leaves words generally out, and he criticizes foolishness with his dry humor. His drawings are the ethical repudiation of the merchant mood of our times. The small men, the main characters in his cartoons, remind us of the grey men created by Michael Ende in his novel Momo. Garzon’s little men carry the time in their brief cases, but, like in a Pandora’s box, they also carry therein many other fake values that we use for destroying. Nevertheless, in the same brief case many men carry their hope.Garzon’s work raises three issues: (I) the problems of perception, by means of which we see and hear only what we can and want to see and hear, thus checkmating objectivity; (II) the problem of language, which he solves leaving an implicit text, like N. Gómez Dávila, and inviting us to write our own scholia; (III) the problem of the instant, and our own relation to time, in which he reminds us of Heidegger and Ende when he says that “we know from where we stand”.Garzon has made etchings out of many of his drawings, in this way he has duplicated the creative energy of his newspaper work, thereby he gives us and himself a full new aesthetic pleasure with skillful bounty.