by Mankoff, Bob
“Bad news on Wall Street today, as the bottom fell out of the market, the sides collapsed, and the top blew away.”
or even Judaism.
“And remember, if you need anything I’m available 24/6.”
Anyway, I stayed in school, and by the time I was ready for high school, my drawing ability had improved from the gloomy Russian guy to this portrait inspired by a newspaper photograph:
Even though it seems to be missing an ear, it was good enough to cause my art teacher in Junior High School 216 to suggest that I compile a portfolio of my drawings and apply to the High School of Music and Art. It really should have been called Music or Art, because students did one or the other but not both. Which was good for me, because while I could draw a wheelbarrow, I couldn’t carry a tune in one. Years later, Music and Art merged with the High School of Performing Arts. A fictionalized version of that school became the basis for the movie Fame.
I didn’t attain any fame at Music and Art. However, careful study of anatomy taught me that the human head has two ears and eventually earned me this diploma:
Despite what my diploma claims, I don’t think my teachers at M&A would have said that my behavior was “satisfactory.” “Satiric” would be more like it. Whenever the teacher wasn’t looking, I would draw cartoons mocking what was going on in class. Every once in a while a teacher would wheel around and catch me at it, saying something like “Robert, if you think that’s so funny, perhaps you would like to share it with the rest of the class!” And I’d always reply, “Indeed I would.” But it was always the principal I ended up sharing with.
While Music and Art didn’t offer a course in satire, the arts program had courses in figure drawing, painting, architecture, and sculpture.
I still have this work of mine from a bygone sculpture class:
I’ve taken to calling him Quasimodo, but the piece was actually inspired by this image of Rocky Marciano knocking out Jersey Joe Walcott:
What the sculpture lacks in anatomical accuracy (clearly I was still having some problems in the depiction of ears) I think it makes up for in emotional intensity. Still, most of my emotional intensity in that class was directed toward Alice Garin, seen in her mug shot from our 1962 yearbook:
Nice mug, but weird hairdo. I think it was inspired by the early ’60s pillbox hat craze.
I really had a case of the hots for Alice, who, unfortunately, had a case of the cools for me. But spurned ardor is not necessarily diminished ardor, and I can still recall many a fantasy she inspired.
I eventually sublimated my unrequited lust for Alice and redirected my erotic energy not to art but to basketball. M&A, which was located in what is called Spanish Harlem, had a basketball team and, in fact, competed against some pretty tough inner-city schools. I tried out for it every year and finally, harnessing all my repressed libidinal energy, made the team during my senior year.
Can you pick me out? Hint: I didn’t used to be black, Hispanic, or blond, am wearing a T-shirt to hide the enormously overdeveloped musculature in my arms, and look more like Jerry Lewis than anyone else in the photo.
Our team was surprisingly good that year, considering the league we played in and how much the other teams reviled us. The prospect of losing to artsy-fartsy Music and Artsy was really humiliating for these macho schools. And from our perspective, it was hard to sink a shot while constantly being taunted by cries of “Shoot the ball, faggot.” How to respond? Well, in addition to my signature offensive move of appearing to throw up and then suddenly shooting, I also employed my signature humor by replying to the faggot taunts with “I will as soon as my nails dry.”
I’m most proud of the innovative defensive maneuver I developed in an intraleague game against the Bronx High School of Science, the one school that could outnerd us. Here I am employing it against some elongated geek who is calculating the parabolic arc of his shot, which he is never going to hit because I’m about to snatch his glasses away.
Despite innovations like this one, I was not the star of the team. That would be Fred Thaler, three to my left in the team photo. His huge hands were good for palming a basketball, spanning chords on a piano, and flicking boogers. Fred has had a very successful career as a musician, and as with many M&Aers, his talent was obvious right from the start.
It’s not that everyone who went to Music and Art was that focused. I certainly wasn’t, but a lot of students were, with the out-and-out focus king being my classmate Edward Burak.
He’s the guy in this yearbook photo with the pipe. He always knew exactly what he wanted to be
and devoted his life to the aesthetics of the pipe.
Who knows what I would have become if I had had that type of single-minded focus?
But I didn’t. I had no idea of what I wanted to be, although my experience at Music and Art had taught me that one thing I definitely was not going to be was an artist or illustrator. Wasn’t good enough. Sure, some of the kids at M&A drew worse than me, but a lot more drew better, and some were incredible draftsmen. And being exposed to real drawing talent made mine wither. I didn’t touch a pen, pencil, or paintbrush for three years after graduating. But, as my diploma attests, I did graduate.
So, off I went to Syracuse University, where I devoted myself to the aesthetics of my hair.
Also to being a wise guy—as in Jewish from Queens, not Italian from Little Italy. Aristotle said that wit is a kind of “educated insolence.” Some of my own education in this type of insolence came during the sociology final in my junior year at Syracuse University. I was, shall we say, an indifferent student—and my professors from that time would confirm this. That is, if they remember me at all, which would be unlikely because I never went to class, so the only time they saw me was during finals. Once, I overslept and arrived half an hour late for an exam. While grabbing the exam book, I caught the professor’s suspicious eye. He came over to my desk and said loudly,
“Who the hell are you?” The class giggled.
I replied, “You know, I could very well ask you the same question.”
He laughed hard. The class laughed harder. I flunked. Lesson learned, but not the one he was teaching. What I realized was that the power of humor was more than just the ability to get laughs. It conferred a kind of actual power. It’s a commonplace that it’s easier for the boss to get a laugh than a subordinate.
“All right, Rogers! I know I made a humorous remark, but in my opinion you’ve laughed enough.”
In that classroom situation I was certainly the subordinate and the teacher was definitely the boss, until humor reversed the roles.
Incidents like that taught me something else about humor: that it demands a certain chutzpah, the guts to do something, not just think it. Following that credo, I did some things during those years that were funny clever, some that were funny crazy, and some that were both. Looking back, I think some of my pranks were a kind of performance art before there was performance art. An example:
The student cafeteria at Syracuse had a rule that you had to wear socks, but at the time my preference was for loafers without socks. I solved that problem by using Magic Markers to decorate my bare feet and ankles with a pair of simulated argyle socks.
In my senior year at Syracuse, 1966, a book that would be important to me came out: Learning to Cartoon, by Syd Hoff, who most people of a certain age identify with the children’s classics Danny and the Dinosaur and Sammy the Seal. But Hoff was also an accomplished and prolific gag cartoonist who drew hundreds of cartoons for The New Yorker and many thousands for other magazines and newspapers. The preface was very encouraging, with genial Syd assuring me how easy the process would be.
The table of contents made it all seem pretty straightforward.
As did the basic illustrations on composition
and figure drawing, which were as simple as they were sexist.
I worked hard all that year to produce twenty-seven cartoons. Twenty-seven, count ’em. I know I did, because I was so impres
sed with the number. I figured these would soon be published, providing vast amounts of income and laurels on which I could comfortably rest before creating another year’s worth. What were those cartoons of mine like? Here are a couple of examples sketched from memory.
“Hey honey, did you know if you hold a glass up to your ear you can hear the sink?”
I confidently took them around to the magazines of that time that featured cartoons, like The Saturday Evening Post, Look, and Esquire, though not The New Yorker. The New Yorker would not see you in person, whereas the cartoon editors of these other magazines would. And I wanted my genius to be validated in person. The editors were very nice but nevertheless rejected all twenty-seven—count ’em—of my cartoons. They did, however, encourage me to come back with more. More? How could anyone do more than twenty-seven cartoons? With my genius insulted—in person, no less—I quit cartooning to see what else I might be suited for, only before I could find out, the United States government determined that I was suited for combat in Vietnam. So I determined that I needed to get a deferment.
Look, I was as patriotic as the next guy, so long as the next guy was a draft dodger. My first dodge was to get a job as a welfare worker, which at the time provided you with a temporary deferment. In my case very temporary, because I was so bad at it that I got fired and became temporarily eligible for welfare myself. I also once again became eligible for the military, but I didn’t like the short-hair thing or the killing thing—which was bad—or the dying thing, which was worse.
My father, Lou Mankoff, had served honorably in the Big One, where millions had died. He tried to convince me that my apprehensions were overwrought about this Smaller One, where mere thousands were perishing. He pointed out that I might not be sent to Vietnam; that even if I was, I might not see combat; that even if I did, I might not get shot; that even if was shot … He didn’t finish that part because I told him I was going to Canada. But I didn’t, because he had something else up his sleeve: a graduate school deferment. Great idea, except I couldn’t get into graduate school because my grades were so poor. No problem: the ever-resourceful Lou removed from his sleeve a newspaper ad, which proclaimed, in huge print, “WE WILL GET YOU INTO GRADUATE SCHOOL IN TWO WEEKS!” And in much smaller print: “for $300.”
Shortly thereafter I walked into the graduate psychology program at Atlanta University, in Georgia, an all-black school except, now, for me.
I roomed with a guy from Ghana, name of Agyenim Boateng, who was outraged by how whites treated blacks in this country and sometimes told me that blacks should “burn the country down.” Other than that, he really was a very reasonable fellow and, even though I was white, never tried to set me on fire. In later years he mellowed, became a United States citizen, a Republican, and eventually the deputy attorney general of Kentucky, where, as far as I know, he strictly enforced the laws against arson.
Being white down in the black section of Atlanta in the late 1960s was an interesting experience. Atlanta was the home of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and I was sometimes mistaken for one of the few whites involved in the organization. One time at a diner that, unbeknownst to me, was a SNCC gathering place, Stokely Carmichael came up to me (without the microphones) and asked me if I was Frank. I
said, “No, I’m Bob, but right on anyway, brother.” What was this radical firebrand’s response? He laughed. My education in insolence continued.
After sometimes being mistaken for someone else and sometimes being mistaken for a psychology student, I transferred from Atlanta University to Fairleigh Dickinson University, where I got a master’s in experimental psychology, and then to the City University of New York, where I came oh so close to getting a PhD. Here’s my transcript to prove it:
When, after I’d spent two years in the program, my experimental animal died (and not from laughter, I might add), I took it as an omen to quit.
“You can’t miss it. Take a right and two lefts.”
Besides, something was drawing my attention away from psychology: drawing. I had never completely stopped drawing cartoons, even while in graduate school, and my fizzling psychology career reignited my passion for it.
Ironically, decades later I would return to psychology to study what made people, not animals, laugh. But back then, I knew that quitting would disappoint my Jewish mother, who was hoping she could one day exclaim, “My son, the doctorate!”
I tried persuading her that I was merely switching from one “ology” to another. Instead of being a psychologist, I would be a cartoonologist.
She told me that whatever I wanted to be was fine with her, even if it was a garbageman—so long, she specified, as I was the best garbageman.
Eventually I convinced her that becoming a cartoonist was less of a long shot than being the top garbageman in a city with more than eleven thousand sanitation workers.
My father was a tougher case. When he heard I wanted to be a cartoonist, he solemnly declared, “You know, they already have people who do that.” He was right, of course. There were no signs in The New Yorker indicating a shortage of cartoonists.
Jokingly, I pointed out that one of them might die; I would scan the obits for this event and, when it happened, seize the opportunity, pop up at The New Yorker’s offices, portfolio in hand, ready to begin my glorious cartooning career. To which he replied,
“You’re joking, right?”
“Right, that’s why I should be a cartoonist.”
Only what would be required to accomplish that goal was not a New Yorker cartoonist obit vigil but persistence, a lesson I’d learned as an animal behaviorist doling out rewards and punishments to helpless critters in ways that are now outlawed by both the American Psychological Association and the Geneva Conventions.
The reward-and-punishment theory being applied to the rodent above had relevance to the Robert below.
These experiments taught me that consistent rewards do not encourage the persistent habits you need to make it as a cartoonist.
You would think that rewarding an animal every time it performs a desired act would be the best way to instill a habit. Rewarding that way is known as a continuous reinforcement schedule. The problem is that the habit quickly disappears when the rewards stop. In behavioral jargon this is called “extinction.” A rat rewarded with food every time he presses the bar has a fit if the reward is withheld. He sulks, pouts, and then stops.
On the other hand, you can train animals to be very persistent by rewarding them on what are called intermittent schedules of reinforcement. Sometimes a reward occurs after one response, sometimes after 10 or 16 or 112 or 1,012. Schedule it right and these animals are hooked for life.
And, by analogy, that’s what happened to me. I began selling cartoons to a variety of magazines, including Saturday Review
“Elementary, my dear Watson: the cartoonist did it.”
and National Lampoon.
“Quick! Hide! That may be my husband!”
The editors, it turns out, were subjecting me to the same intermittent reinforcement schedule I’d used on the rats. Here I am, not realizing the Skinner box I have gotten myself into, hooked just like my rats on the intermittent rewards, not of food pellets but of selling cartoons.
At this point in my quest for cartoon success, my father had taken to bragging to his friends, “They laughed when my son said he was going to be a cartoonist, but they’re not laughing now.” I had to remind him that I wanted them to be laughing—but one magazine, The New Yorker, still wasn’t.
After two years of submitting, all I had to show for it were enough New Yorker rejection slips to wallpaper my bathroom.
Undaunted, and financially sustained by the sales to other magazines, I kept at it. Besides, I had other rooms that needed wallpaper.
CHAPTER THREE
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CARTOONING
Why was I so obsessed with getting published in The New Yorker? Well, it would be a big boost to my ego, which at that point, publication
in other magazines notwithstanding, needed some boosting. The New Yorker was and is the Everest of magazine cartooning. Scaling that mountain would mean that I was a SUCCESS! Which would be especially appealing when contrasted with my prior FAILURES! In addition to the welfare and psychology fiascos, I had also flopped at trying to teach speedreading to Catholic high school girls, urging them to read faster or they would burn in hell.
There was also a practical reason for zeroing in on The New Yorker. If I was going to be a real cartoonist, I was going to have to earn a living at it. Maybe not a great living but enough to put a roof over my head and a shag rug on the floor (it was the 1970s, remember).
The New Yorker paid the most for a cartoon: $300. That is the equivalent of about $1,300 today. If you sold twenty cartoons a year, you could scrape by—with the help of periodic grants from the Mollie and Lou Mankoff Foundation.
And I really did want to earn a living as a cartoonist, if only to allow my parents to answer in the affirmative when their nosy friends asked, “Can he make a living at that?” Even after all these years, I still get that same question—and, more pointedly, the inquiry about what The New Yorker pays for cartoons. I say I’m happy to tell my questioner if they’re happy telling me how much money they make. Usually they’re not.
But, to be honest, the real root of my obsession with The New Yorker lay in its historic role in the development of the magazine cartoon. That’s how it is for many cartoonists, and even noncartoonists, like the late film critic Roger Ebert, who wrote this on his blog:
