Poking a Dead Frog

by Mike Sacks

  Most people drawing cartoons are guys; they draw things from a male perspective. I don’t usually get too bent out of shape about that, because it doesn’t help me. It just makes me agitated. The subject of what guys find funny, what women find funny, and how sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don’t, is a complicated one. I really loved The Comeback, a very short-lived comedy with Lisa Kudrow [HBO, 2005]. Whereas a movie like [2012’s Seth MacFarlane–directed] Ted, and how successful it is—that’s a ticket to Depressionland for me. Not that I’ve seen it. Maybe it’s a real side-splitter. I don’t care about drawings of harping wives. Some wives harp.

  How much were you paid for your first New Yorker cartoon?

  Two hundred fifty dollars.

  How much are you paid today for a New Yorker cartoon?

  One thousand three hundred fifty dollars.

  What was the reaction to your first New Yorker cartoon, published in 1978? Even looking at it today, I find it to be very odd and different. It’s called “Little Things,” and it features bizarre shapes with funny names: “chent,” “spak,” “kabe,” “tiv,” and so on. There’s no gag—at least in the traditional sense.

  I think a lot of readers were pretty perturbed. Some of the older New Yorker cartoonists were really bothered by that cartoon, too. It’s strange that Lee chose that one. I had submitted fifty or sixty, and this was the weirdest in the batch. It was so rough and personal, and it was so weird. [Laughs] Later, Lee told me that somebody had asked him whether he owed my family any money.

  It was certainly a break from the type of New Yorker cartoon that came before.

  I knew that my cartoons were quite different, which is why I never really thought they would appear in The New Yorker. I never deliberately set out to be different; that’s just how I draw. But if I tried to conform to somebody else’s idea of what’s funny, I’d have no compass at all. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

  I don’t dislike genre cartoons. In fact, I have done quite a few. I love tombstone gags, end-of-the-world guy gags, pushcart gags. But my favorite cartoonists have been the ones who create specific cartoon worlds, not just come up with a good gag line. I like being able to imagine what’s in the rooms of the house that I’m not seeing in that particular cartoon. Like what’s in those people’s refrigerator.

  It’s hard to draw—at least in detail—worlds that you don’t know. I don’t know what’s in a penthouse refrigerator. Expensive champagne? Maybe some really old capers?

  Has The New Yorker’s submission process changed for you since you first began?

  No, it hasn’t changed much at all. I’ve submitted, let’s see: thirty years times forty-six weeks on average a year . . . whatever that is, since I first started, and I still do it basically the same way. Each week I submit between five and ten cartoons. Usually, about six or seven.

  And how many, on average, will be accepted each week?

  It’s really hard to say. I might average one per issue for maybe three or four weeks in a row, but then I might go for three or four weeks and not sell any. And then the next week, for no reason at all, it seems, they’ll buy two. I’ll feel great, but then I’m back to square one. It’s a cycle, but it’s frightening because I never know if the cycle will remain stuck on my not selling anything.

  Someone once told me about a psychological experiment that was done with rats: If you keep rewarding the rats with a pellet each time they push a lever, they will eventually become bored and stop pushing the lever. And if they receive no pellets at all, they’ll get discouraged and stop pushing the lever. But if you provide them with intermittent, random pellets, they just keep pushing that lever. Sometimes I feel like I am that rat.

  It’s a tough business. You only feel as good as your last sale. Even this many years later, I still get depressed if I haven’t made a sale for a couple of weeks. I always feel like that’s the end of it, you know—I really have run out of ideas!

  You would think that by now I would understand that when I get depressed, it’s part of the cycle. But it’s still hard. The fact is, there are no guarantees. I don’t know too many cartoonists who are superconfident people.

  Do you hand-deliver these cartoons to The New Yorker office?

  I used to go every week, but it just took too much time. In the eighties, I’d have a weekly lunch with the rest of The New Yorker cartoonists. But when we all moved out of the city, the group disbanded. I feel I can better use my time to stay at home and work. Or procrastinate.

  Once a week, I fax a batch of rough sketches to The New Yorker offices. I try to draw pretty much what the finished cartoon will look like. You know, if people are standing in a room, I’ll sketch the room, but I won’t put in all of the fine detail until the cartoon is bought. The initial versions are always rough. If they buy it, I do a finish—a finished version of the sketch.

  How long does a finish take?

  For a very simple drawing, it might take an hour and a half. For a more complicated one, especially those in color, it might take several hours.

  What exactly goes on in a New Yorker cartoon meeting? To me—and, I think, to many others—The New Yorker is like the Kremlin. It’s a world of mystery, smoke, and mirrors.

  The deadline is late on Tuesday. Every cartoonist either e-mails or brings to the offices a batch of rough sketches, usually about five to ten. I’ve never been to a New Yorker art meeting where the editors talked about cartoons, which takes place on Wednesday. It’d be like peeking in on your parents and accidentally seeing them doing things you know they do, but don’t want to think about them doing.

  I once read an article that described the process, but I’ve since repressed it. As much as I would like to imagine the editors saying, “This one is really good, but this one is even better!,” I know the disgusting, painful reality.

  Do a lot of these ideas for cartoons gestate for a long time before you sketch them?

  Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Often, ideas will crop up when I’m in my studio just doodling and thinking. I remember when I was drawing “The Fantastic Voyage” [Scientific American, July 2002]. I had been thinking about the cliché of spaceships and strange submarine-like vehicles that would travel through the body in sci-fi films from the fifties and sixties. I wondered, What if people were in a broken-down bus instead? Or in the family sedan? That’s how that cartoon came about.

  I once doodled a crazy man holding a sign that read: THE END IS NEAR! I just felt like drawing one of these guys. Who knows why. After looking at the guy for awhile, I realized that he needed a crazy wife. So I drew him a wife, and she was holding up a sign that said: YOU WISH. That one came out of the blue.

  What ideas are you currently mulling over?

  I’m working on an idea now. I wrote down, “Break Internet.” I like the thought of breaking the Internet, as if it were a toy or an appliance. Now that I describe it, it sounds pretty lame. [The cartoon was not bought.]

  How extensive is your backlog of unsold cartoons?

  Thousands and thousands. It’s an ocean of rejection. A lot of them are very dated, and a lot of them are just plain bad, but in that pile I will sometimes find something I want to rework. I have so many rejected drawings that it almost becomes raw material for me. When I’m stuck, I sometimes go into that file, and I’ll see if there’s an idea hiding that can be fixed.

  How much time do you spend on the exact wording of your cartoons?

  It really depends. Sometimes a cartoon will be very clear in my head from the minute I conceptualize it. Other times—especially with a multipanel “story” cartoon—it takes longer. I like the editing process. I think—I hope—that this is something I’ve gotten better at as I’ve gotten older. I probably could have done more self-editing when I was younger.

  Specifically, what sort of self-editing?

  Eliminating things I don’t need; paying attention to the rhythm of a joke. I don’t want to make an
yone read more than absolutely necessary.

  I wonder how many readers even notice how finely structured the wording is in certain cartoons—such as with your work, or Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, or Gary Larson’s The Far Side. There’s never an extra comma or beat.

  Bad rhythm is something you see frequently with amateur cartoonists. With that said, there are times when I can feel the rhythm of a cartoon more clearly than at other times. I work on deadline, and I have to do this whether I’m in the mood to work or not. But why I’m in the mood sometimes and not at other times is still a mystery.

  Do you have tricks you’ve taught yourself that have made the process less difficult?

  Getting away from work and coming back to it fresh really helps. Also, Truman Capote once said that if you have to leave a manuscript or a chapter, don’t finish up the last little bit, because then, when you come back, you’ll have to restart from nothing. I’ve often used this approach. If I’m going downstairs for lunch, I leave something I’m excited to come back to—so I won’t be starting from zero miles per hour. But it doesn’t always work.

  Do you consider yourself as much a writer as a cartoonist?

  I don’t consider myself as much of a writer as a “real” writer—those writers who write without drawings. And I don’t consider myself as much of an artist as a “real” artist—somebody who paints without using any words. But cartooning is a hybrid, and cartoonists are hybrids. We feel incomplete doing just one or the other. When I have to write and I can’t use pictures, it’s very frustrating. You work in the medium best suited to what you have to say, and, for me, that’s cartooning.

  So where do you see the art of cartooning in the future? Do you think it’ll remain a viable profession?

  I don’t know how viable it is now. It’s a very tough profession. I really don’t know whether cartooning for magazines will stick around. There’s a lot written about teenagers and print media and how irrelevant the nonelectronic media might soon become. I really don’t know what’s going to happen. But I do know that if someone wants to become a cartoonist they’re going to find an outlet.

  I’d like to learn more about animation programs. If there was a computer program that wasn’t too difficult to learn, I might just give it a shot. Hopefully you can always learn something new. Key word: hopefully.

  Any advice for cartoonists starting out with their careers?

  I’m really grateful for the life-drawing classes I took at art school. Not that anyone looking at my characters would believe it, but I think life-drawing is really important. A cartoonist has to know how a body sits or stands on a page. It’s like learning a language.

  You can’t teach a cartoonist how to have a style. They can improve their own style, but it’s impossible to provide a style to someone who doesn’t have one. And that has to be learned on your own.

  Do you have any regrets? It seems that no matter how successful anyone is, they always have at least one major regret.

  I feel that on my deathbed, which is something I hope to eventually have, I’ll probably look back and wish that I didn’t always look on the dark side of everything. But how can you not? You could die at any time, for any reason. You’re walking under an air conditioner, and kaboom! My parents actually knew someone who was killed by a falling flower pot. But we have to kind of go along and put one foot in front of the other and pretend that we don’t know that everything could take a serious turn for the worse in the next second.

  It’s all in the pretending.

  Yes, it’s all in the pretending. Any of us could walk outside right now and Mr. Anvil could suddenly meet Mr. Top of Head. But we pretend otherwise.

  Actually, that’d make for a nice cartoon.

  And if I’m safely off to the side while it happens to you, and if there’s a deadline looming, I would absolutely love to draw it. [Laughs]

  ULTRASPECIFIC COMEDIC KNOWLEDGE

  HENRY ALFORD

  Contributor, Spy, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker; Author, Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners

  How to Be Funny as a Journalist

  You’ve been a writer now for over thirty years. Your specialty is humorous first-person journalistic accounts. But how would you define yourself? As a journalist? Or as a humorist?

  I usually say both. The writing that I seem to be known for—the first-person, fish-out-of-water, investigative, humor-type pieces—are a hybrid. I usually say, “George Plimpton, but with more leotards.”

  Do such definitions matter in the industry? How important are labels for magazine and book editors looking to assign articles or seeking to purchase book manuscripts?

  Well, being a prose writer who doesn’t write for TV or film, I wouldn’t be able to eat if I weren’t willing to do a certain amount of fact-gathering. If you’re going to try to make a living off of being funny in books and magazines and newspapers, you probably need either to do some reporting or be a brand-name cartoonist.

  The beauty part of embracing facts is that I can get an assignment and I can get a book deal. Unless you’re, say, Steve Martin, you can’t get an assignment to write a factless humor piece, and you can’t get a book deal to write a novel. But I could go to a publisher and say, “I want to be a Mexican wrestler for a year,” or, “I want to interview everyone in Ohio named Barry,” and they might cough up some money for that.

  How difficult would it be for you to get an assignment to write a factless humor piece?

  I still do occasionally write pieces without facts—and like most writers, I labor under the delusion that I’ll write a novel one day, just as soon as it drops from the sky onto my head, already written. And, sure, very occasionally someone will assign me a bit o’ whimsy. But bookwise, that’s a tiny, tiny market, unless you’re working on books meant to end up next to the cash register or the toilet.

  It’s possible that someone would be willing to publish all my New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs and the wackier of my op-eds from The New York Times, but I’d go into it knowing that it probably wouldn’t sell a ton.

  There’s a fine line between being funny as a journalist and being overbearing—or even mean-spirited. What is that line and how is it best avoided?

  I always say, The easiest three ways to make a name for yourself as a journalist are to be a really bitchy reviewer, to write a sex column, or to do Q&As that are heavy on the Qs. So, I’ve tried to avoid those things, which I usually find overbearing.

  With respect to my own work—especially the material where people don’t know I’m writing about them—I try never to name or make identifiable anyone that I’m not in a professional relationship with. Like, once I took the National Dog Groomers Association’s certification test. I have limited skills in this area, despite my homosexuality. In the throes of the exam, I ended up smearing lipstick on my cocker spaniel’s snout and telling the test administrator, “I like a dog with a face.” When I wrote the experience up in an article, I made the test administrator identifiable—she and I were in a professional relationship—but not the other test-takers in the room. That distinction seems only fair to me. Likewise, if you’re selling me something, or if I’ve paid you to provide a service, you’re fair game. If you’re standing in the background, I’m gonna pixilate you.

  Also, I self-deprecate a lot. The upside of self-absorption is that you don’t pay other people enough heed to hurt their feelings.

  Do you ever think you’ve crossed that line into meanness?

  Sure, particularly when I was younger. I did a story in Spy magazine once—this is going back twenty-five years—for which I stayed at a bunch of bed-and-breakfasts in Manhattan, tangling with various hosts’ unwillingness to tell me whether or not as a paying guest I was allowed to sit in their living room. One host, a distracted woman in her fifties, told me that she was going to be doing some exercises in her living room—“an activity,” I wrote, “which I could only i
magine involves a lot of crouching and lotion.” I reread this line the other day and had two thoughts about it. One, it’s sort of mean and ad hominem. Two, I am this woman now.

  I like to think that my inner compass keeps me from being condescending, but I’m sure there are people who’d be willing to tell you otherwise. Worse comes to worst, a good editor can alert you to condescension. Ignorant: sure, probably have been there, too. No, the more tricky one for me—particularly if people don’t know I’m writing about them, or if people who are being interviewed are a little more candid than they should be—is knowing whether or not I can use a juicy, possibly damning comment or revelation. I go through a whole Kübler-Ross, male-menopausal, weather storm-map-ish rinse cycle with those. I’ll ask myself, Is it something they would have told me if they knew I was writing a story? Is it worth it to me to ask them if I can use it, only to possibly have them say no? Is the speaker or doer identifiable in the story? I’m inherently a pretty polite, don’t-make-a-lot-of-waves, cheery-to-the-point-of-bland, PepperidgeFarms–y WASP, and this orientation doesn’t always scream “good reporter.”

  As a journalist, you enter and write about other worlds: whether it’s the hipster community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an a capella group at Yale, or a cruise sponsored by the liberal magazine The Nation. Since you’re an outsider in these situations, I’d imagine you’d want to take extra care not to appear condescending or ignorant.

  I’m pretty conscious of the fact that I play on an uneven playing field. Uneven because 1) I’m the writer, so I’m always going to have the last word, and 2) sometimes I know in advance what I’m going to say before I enter the situation. For instance, I knew when I was writing my Brooklyn hipster story for The New York Times [“How I Became a Hipster,” May 1, 2013] that I would enter a clothing store and ask, “Are your socks local?” When I sang with the Yale Whiffenpoofs [The New York Times, “Singing for Their Supper,” January 11, 2013], I knew I would tell someone at Yale that Osama bin Laden had been in an a capella group as a teen and that I wished that his group had been called Vocal Jihad. So, I’m semi-armed. Thus, it’s particularly important for me to be generous and kind in my coverage, and also to make myself look as much like an ass as possible.