🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for the new month, which is coming in locally with October showers (a tiny amount of rain, but always an excitement in what is still the dry season in this part of the world)
And now I turn to a William Haefeli cartoon from the New Yorker issue of 9/22/25 (this is only a bit behind the times; I have promised follow-up postings to first installments going all the way back to January, and my life is now spectacularly more difficult than it was before, so I’m just taking random shots). This cartoon:
(#1) All about the complexities in offers of help — from anyone, from someone who shares your household, from your spouse (or equivalent partner), or specifically from your same-sex partner, or (since this is Haefeli) even more specifically from your gay male partner; and also about the division of labor in households of all sorts
The cartoon is in face exceedingly rich, readable at several different levels. It is, in fact, funny even if you eliminate all the rich social specificity Haefeli has built into it.
A thought experiment: replace the highly socially located characters in #1 by cute indistinguishable cartoon creatures not identifiable by species or sex. One is engaged in some neutral task, like sorting unidentifiable objects; the other, standing by and observing, asks (in a way that presupposes that the observer doesn’t already know how to do the task):
Can I do something to help that won’t take you twenty minutes to show me how to do?
(This is an offer to help, couched indirectly, as a question, and also hedged, with a precondition on the offer.)
It’s still funny — because all tasks require skills, which must be learned (by observation or instruction, and then by practice), but there’s a wide range of complexity and difficulty for these skills, and at the upper end of the range, it could take a significant amount of time for a new helper to pick up the skill, so the observer conveys that their offer is conditional on the learning time being short; 20 minutes would be too great an investment for them. We then have some wry mockery of the observer’s attitudes — that they’ll do it, but only if it’s not too much trouble. They want the credit for offering, but don’t want to commit much to the task.
In real life, I have often had the experience, in difficult times, of having someone turn up offering to give me whatever help is needed, but then when asked to do some specific task, demurring on the grounds that “Oh, I couldn’t do that!” I have an especially unpleasant memory of my stepmother-in-law arriving in Cambridge MA (in the middle of a bitter winter, from Florida), after our daughter Elizabeth was born, to help out with the baby. Almost anything that would have helped us — doing some cooking, getting groceries, taking clothes to the laundromat, whatever — was greeted with “Oh, I couldn’t do that!”. After a few days she went back to Florida and out of our lives for a while, to our great relief.
But now in the social context. As soon as you add some social context, the cartoon becomes much richer.
First, the task is cooking, which is famously complex and time-consuming. And look at that kitchen! Crowded with pots and pans and, everywhere, ingredients. Conveying that helping out is likely to be no small undertaking.
Second, the the cartoon is about a cook and their housemate, so the division of household labor now comes to the fore: how does it come about that one person does all the cooking while the other merely observes, sometimes extending a conditional offer of help?
Third, domestic cooking in our sociocultural context is “women’s work”, so we would guess that the cook is female and the observer male, that these roles are assigned by gender-normative conventions, with the result that the observer is being cast as normatively masculine: pointedly not doing women’s work, because that would be feminine. But he might, um, lend a hand to the little lady. As a favor. If it wasn’t too much trouble. Then the cartoon is a poke at the pretensions of the observer.
But, wait! Fourth, the couple in the actual cartoon are both men. Whatever their relationship, if they are at least housemates, tasks have to get done, and somebody’s got to take the cook role. The roles have to be negotiated. And the cartoon is, again, a poke at the pretensions of the observer.
And then, in fact, the cartoon comes from Haefeli-land, a place of urban (very likely, NYC) upper middle class couples, many of them gay men. So fifth, the men in the cartoon are in fact a gay couple — and they are differentiated as two different types of gay men: the observer presenting himself as normatively masculine in appearance, the cook as deviating from these norms (earring, fashionable haircut, ponytail). Which, by playing on the norms (real men don’t cook), makes the cartoon an actual swipe at the pretensions of the observer.
The cartoon might have been titled “Sympathy for the Cook”. See, in this light, an earlier Haefeli cartoon:
(#2) Again, the cook
Real life is, of course, immensely complicated, and roles and presentations are distributed in all sorts of ways, at different times, in different contexts, for different purposes. This is literally the cartoon version.
