MARRIAGE A LA MODE

In honor of the royal wedding of Prince William and commoner Kate Middleton, London’s Cartoon Museum mounted a special exhibition of satirical drawings about the monarchy and nuptials through the years. “The Cartoon Museum,” writes Sophie Grove at herocomplex.latimes.com, “is a quirky converted dairy in a back street tucked behind the British Museum with a library and a permanent exhibition of around 2,000 cartoons, caricatures and comics from 18th century engravings to modern-day animation and comic strips.” The special  exhibition, "Marriage à la Mode: Royals and Commoners In and Out of Love,” is “a revealing, barbed view into changing attitudes toward marriage, class and morality in British society.”

Among the pictures on display is William Hogarth's 1743 series of scathing caricature engravings titled "Marriage à la Mode.”

The exhibition runs a little thin beginning in the Victorian era, Grove observes, when “the shenanigans of the upper classes were deemed off limits to the press.” The blackout lasted through the early 1930s when the press displayed remarkable restraint in not mentioning the affair that the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne, was conducting with the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, whom he later gave up the throne to marry. But by the 1970s with the savage advent of such visual excesses as those produced by Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman, satire was back.

“The visual vitrol” that plagued the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer “makes today’s images of Kate Middleton look mild,” said Grove, citing the remark by the show’s curator, Anita O’Brien: “So far, Kate has been exemplary in her behavior: she hasn’t put a foot wrong.”

Too bad for cartoonists.

Satire, however, was scarcely dead at the Royal Wedding. It was perched on the heads of most of the ladies in the crowd. Any time the Queen is in attendance, British women are expected to wear hats. The Queen always wears a hat when she’s out in public, and her hats are always remarkable — plain, unadorned, but notably large. Otherwise undistinguished, you might say — if you didn’t opt for “ugly.” For the wedding of William and Kate, she wore a bright yellow hat with a wide brim and a crown of surprising altitude. It came close to rivaling Abraham Lincoln’s top hat. Perhaps as a subliminal critique of Her Majesty’s choice of chapeau, the women in Westminster Abbey and beyond were wearing the most outlandish headgear — swirling knots of cloth, riots of fake flowers, off-kilter tilts, lopsided brims of vast circumference, frizzes and fizzes, curls and loops. Acts of stand-up comedy, every one. If they weren’t staging a satiric protest against the dictate of custom that required them to wear hats, they should have been. It sure looked like satire to me.