World Humor Awards: Ten Years

The Award is not yet adolescent, but it is in that pause or slow awakening between puberty and adolescence, in a metamorphosis that will make an adult individual bloom. Yet we all realize that it has grown, that it has put down roots, that it has become not only a ritual appointment, but a lively and vital space for meeting and comparison, mixing moods and colors, with international dimensions and scope, beyond every frontier, starting with mental ones. And it must be recognized that the dream long refined and then realized with greater effort has been that of Gianandrea Bianchi, true father of the Award, who has been able to unite those voices from the world with that of Giovannino Guareschi in the small handkerchief of the Small World that the Po and fantasy have always made great, to the unison rhythm of human hearts. With him a small but fierce team of artists, friends, public administrators and sponsors who believed that a smile would improve the world, would be a viaticum for possible and future friendships, that an image would redeem the confusion of languages and especially the distortion of thoughts. That the Award is growing is demonstrated by the quality of the works that arrived this year as well. The artists participating in the tenth edition, coming from about seventy countries (excluding those out of competition, guests and jury members) are 183 for 311 cartoons, 108 for 177 caricatures.

The theme of this edition remains, somewhat, like that of last year, a free theme. “How the World Turns” has a playful and ironic lightness like a joyful greeting, a curious request, but absolutely generic and generalist, to the point of not being able to suggest a univocal visual solution. Certainly the Award has matured and that is why the quality of the images of the tenth edition is very high, but surely the title has contributed to bringing out problems and moods that hover and disturb in everyone’s daily life, with more or less urgency. Many paths have thus diversified and the moods have become more personal, the iconographies profoundly diversified, sometimes to the limit of clash, of frontal contrast, with certainly freer, more authentic and vital outcomes.

Ecological themes have become marginal, as have health ones, but the problem of the plastification of the planet remains, while that of war, militarization, clash and violence between men and between peoples has emerged, prepotent and disturbing. The request for peace cannot find symbols – except the ancient dove, which is swallowed by a whirlpool of blood. The theme is treated according to multiple perspectives, always as a threat, but also with the lucid consciousness that this warmongering is a direct attack on our freedoms, indeed on Freedom itself (often represented with the iconography of the Statue of New York). A desperate God can do nothing but gamble the world with three shell games or sleep forgetful sleeps or, aged, no longer bear the whirling of the planet and with him, for the first time, in the works presented to the Award appears the antithetical devil, who gambles for supremacy in arm wrestling with the Supreme. But even monotheistic religions are accused as a whole of being a source of hatred and violence.

And if war is not evident, here is the world as a planet put to roast in the kitchen or, outdoors, on a spit, an ambiguous but realistic allusion also to rising temperatures or to nuclear power, a constant threat that becomes even more obscure to decipher, even if the culprit is always evident: it is us. Precisely because we are often represented without a head, therefore without thought, but also without memory. There is even a funeral for the brain. Or autistic characters in self-contemplation of themselves, in iterative and solipsistic selfies. If it is not cooked, however, the planet is eaten, nibbled, reduced to a core, in short desertified in a greedy, selfish and disrespectful way. A world even trapped by rotating hamster cages; in some cartoons politics sneaks in with Trump’s election or the accusation against science with Adam and Eve hitting Newton with an apple, while culture can still favor the birth of a flower. However, it is nature that tries to indicate a path to salvation. Even if Guernica is only a grayed painting that anticipates differences still real in flesh and hearts. And then the symbols become famous paintings, paintings that appear as prophecies or laments. All too easy to represent the planet as an unsteady balloon tied to a string. Again: the world as a ball, with all possible game variants. Atlas cannot bear the effort of carrying it, but childishly amuses himself. Or it is compared to the whirling of the roulette disc, to the vortex of the carousel, of the wind rose, of the wheel of fortune or of the fatigue of pedaling a bicycle. An old gramophone with funnel and disc, we don’t know if it still plays and what music.

Mechanization as a threat focuses on artificial intelligence and robotics: emerging obsessions, while social tensions remain, the disparity between north and south, the greed of capitalism and the supremacy of money. The poor man who counts to infinity, believing he can have a place in the game of blind man’s bluff, while the profiteers flee with the loot behind his back. But some authors stop at their private life, at the daily dimension. Sex appears as a theme and the relationship between man and woman and their impact on economic life. There is, however, more widespread, a subtle perception that one wants to consider our only world now useless, old and worn out, so it is thrown in the trash, thrown away without regret like old things that are not used or are no longer known how to use.

But the alternative does not seem more joyful. Many authors have emphasized the resumption of space conquests, of competition for the conquest of new lands. But there is no longer the taste for adventure of the past, the sense of a mystery to unveil, the effort that honors being human, but only the sense of speculation for materials that on earth have become rare and too expensive. The event is already dirty, impoverished to a superficial and pompous competition for a few rich people who lead it far from the choral and popular “giant leap for humanity,” a dream of yesteryear. The caricature section sees Elon Musk in first place and the images tell of him the adventurous story of utopian projects realized and his eyes are small turned inward, isolated from any external vision, while Giorgia Meloni, who follows him in choices, has large emotional eyes that assume his changeable and symptomatic moods.

Parma, May 2025
Marzio Dall’Acqua