If you could prise open a cartoon, at its centre you would find the beating heart of satire. A very large piece in the humour puzzle that creates that cognitive experience we call laughter.
It's a trait that's been around since neanderthal man first slipped on a banana peel, while his whanau pointed and laughed. It knows no boundaries and speaks in hundreds of tongues. Every culture, from the most primitive to the most advanced, practises it in some form. But humour is mostly at the expense of someone else. We all love it - until we are in it.
So satire is a powerful tool, and submerged in a cartoon, it becomes a potent messenger. It's this that tests the maturity of an individual, a community, a government, a religion or a state.
For the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, everything was and still is fair game. Provoking for the sake of provoking. It's been their mantra since conception and, for the most part, flew well under the radar outside of France, and played to a small audience within. The 2006 publishing of the Muhammad cartoons may well have raised their profile internationally, but the lessons learned from the 2005 Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon controversy hadn't sunk in. For the number of mastheads that rushed in solidarity to publish the Danish cartoons, just as many chose not to fall into the Hebdo vortex. Prior to the January 7, 2015 attack, its flagging circulation was just short of 30,000, in a country with a population of over 66 million and on a slippery slope to the publishing graveyard.
Post attack, the "survivors' issue" had an eventual print run of a staggering 7.5 million, with 200,000 signing up for subscription, while the French Government threw in 1 million ($1.62 million) to support the magazine. Twelve months on, today's Charlie Hebdo commemorative issue "The Assassin is still out there" will be just over a million.
