Embiggening Social Change: Muhammad Yunus, The Simpsons and Revolutionary Cartoons

The past week has seen a historic turning point for social business:   Grameen Bank's Muhammad Yunus will be appearing on The Simpsons.  And what's more, the inside scoop from satirist Ruben Bolling is that the episode's really funny.

The real news here is not that microfinance is getting validated by Hollywood--folks in the entertainment biz themselves tend to find the cult of fame a bit goofy, and we don't do ourselves any favors by sounding like marks for the celebrity industrial complex. Instead, the greater significance lies in social entrepreneurship's growing awareness of the power of comics and cartoons.

As Yunus observes in his introduction to this essential collection of The Great Anti-War Cartoons, graphic communication is a potent force for good--indeed, one that is essential to the work of putting "poverty in a museum." The key to its power is that unlike text and learned lectures, comics and cartoons constitute a quintessentially democratic art form.

"Their message is immediate," Yunus explains; "there is no need to have a higher education degree to understand them."  Moreover, using the rules of visual design to transcend the limits of life as experienced, they reveal truths that many dare not speak, yet photos do not capture.  At base, comics and cartoons embody the revolutionary impulse that animates social change--we all can make a difference, and there's nothing we can't do.

Of course, Yunus is not the first to make this point--from Reformation woodcuts to the wordless books of the early twentieth century social justice movement, advocates of social change have long recognized the universal reach of comics and cartoons, and the widespread diffusion of electronic media has only increased the transformative power of graphic communication.

However, one of more cromulent aspects of social entrepreneurship's ongoing bid for mainstream respectability has been the movement's unfortunate tendency to take itself too seriously--and in so doing, to focus on communications strategies accepted as legitimate by the very social structures in need of disruptive change. This may help social enterprise gain status as a Legitimate Institution of the Establishment, but it seriously limits the movement's reach and impact, rendering us functional illiterates in the emerging multimedia lingua franca. If we want to do more than preach to the conformist choir, we need more strategic partnerships with rebels who can draw.

Photo by ripkas