How About Never--Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons

by Mankoff, Bob

  I have entered the New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest almost weekly virtually since it began and have never even been a finalist. Mark Twain advised: “Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.” I have done more writing for free for the New Yorker in the last five years than for anybody in the previous 40 years.

  It’s not that I think my cartoon captions are better than anyone else’s, although some weeks, understandably, I do. It’s that just once I want to see one of my damn captions in the magazine that publishes the best cartoons in the world.

  By the way, in 2011 Ebert finally won, after 107 tries.

  “The best cartoons in the world”: my sentiment exactly. But there was something more, because the cartoons were cheek by jowl with the best articles by the best writers. Damn, The New Yorker even had the best type font, Adobe Caslon, which I’m using here. The New Yorker was the complete package, its great cartoons the perfect complement to its brilliant articles—or from my cartoon-obsessed perspective, the other way around.

  Look, I was born in the Bronx and grew up in the 1950s, when the Yankees were winning one World Series after another. To me The New Yorker was to cartooning what the New York Yankees were to baseball—the Best Team. If you could make that team, you too were one of the best.

  As a kid, I actually fantasized about becoming a Yankee. It would be Maris in right field, the Mick in center, and the Mankoff in left. Well, that was never going to happen, but if I could make The New Yorker cartoon team and take the field alongside

  Saul Steinberg,

  Peter Arno,

  “Now read me the part again where I disinherit everybody.”

  and James Thurber,

  “It’s a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.”

  that would do just fine.

  These and other New Yorker cartoonists didn’t invent the magazine cartoon, but they did revolutionize it. All revolutions need a bit of history to be understood, so I hope you’ll tolerate a brief lesson.

  The honor of inventing the magazine cartoon, and also inadvertently appropriating the word “cartoon” to mean a humorous illustration, goes to the British magazine Punch, which way back the middle of the nineteenth century started it all with this drawing:

  It’s labeled “CARTOON, No. 1,” which would be pretty clever if Punch wanted credit for creating the first cartoon, because, after all, it’s right there telling you it is No. 1. But that’s not the real story, because “cartoon” didn’t mean then what it means now. Then it meant a preliminary sketch for a painting. Punch was mockingly suggesting that its sketch go into a contest to determine which high-toned paintings would adorn the Houses of Parliament. I won’t try to exhume the humor of this illustration, except to say that there was some, it was satiric, and you had to be there in England in 1843 to get it. Since none of us were, let’s move on. Anyway, Punch published more in a similar vein, calling them “cartoons,” and the name stuck.

  By 1899, when this Punch cartoon

  THE POINT OF VIEW.

  Exasperated old gentleman (to lady in front of him). “Excuse me, madam, but my seat has cost me ten shillings, and I want to see. Your hat—” The lady: “My hat has cost me ten guineas, sir, and I want it to be seen!”

  was published, a cartoon definitely meant a drawn joke, though to us the joke just seems drawn out. It was probably a knee-slapper back when big hats on ladies and exasperated old codgers were de rigueur. Anyway, let’s give credit where credit is due—it’s definitely an improvement, to our modern eyes, on Substance and Shadow.

  Cartoons on this side of the Atlantic, like these from Life, aped the Punch model, producing, if not gales of laughter, perhaps an occasional wheeze, which over time turned to a yawn, as the formula ran out of steam in the 1920s.

  He: “BEASTLY SNOBS, THOSE VAN GRUNTS, I BOWED TO THEM. BUT THEY CUT ME DEAD.”

  She: “NEVER MIND, HERE ARE THE SMITHS, LET’S CUT THEM; THEY’VE TRIED TO BOW TO US.”

  She: “YOU CAN’T BUY MY LOVE!”

  He: “BUT YOU DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH MONEY I’VE GOT.”

  Which is when The New Yorker came to the rescue, shaking to bits the old overdrawn, underfunny illustrated dialogue cartoon and replacing it with humor that was quick and visual and whose captions sounded the way Americans spoke.

  But that shake-up took a while to get shook. When The New Yorker was founded, in 1925, proclaiming that it would be distinguished for its cartoons, it really wasn’t. The images were as stiff as those that had gone before, and the language just as stilted.

  “The man who marries my daughter will win a prize.”

  “Well, I must say that’s awfully sporting of you.”

  Visitor: Who’s the old boy going out?

  Member: He’s had tough luck. His wife ran away about a year ago. Then he lost a ball in the rough and that seemed too much for him.

  Something more direct, natural, funny, and sassy was needed. A step in the right direction was taken in this famous and beloved cartoon from 1929, with drawing by Carl Rose and a caption provided by E. B. White.

  “It’s broccoli, dear.”

  “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”

  The incongruity of the little girl willfully and, for that time, somewhat vulgarly ignoring the facts to indulge her own wrongheadedness struck a nerve with the public, and the phrase “I say it’s spinach and the hell with it” became a catchphrase, basically meaning “don’t confuse me with the facts, I’ll do what like.” It was also adapted into a hit song by Irving Berlin.

  Long as there’s you, long as there’s me

  Long as the best things in life are free

  I say it’s spinach and the hell with it

  The hell with it, that’s all!

  The cartoon was still well enough known in 2012 that when the debate over the constitutionality of Obamacare reached the Supreme Court and Justice Antonin Scalia wondered aloud whether, if the government could force you to buy health care, it could also make you eat broccoli, I was able to reference it with this cartoon.

  “I say it’s government-mandated broccoli, and I say the hell with it.”

  However, I shortened the caption to one line, because beloved or not, the original still followed the same old two-line dialogue formula. And while the drawing has more zip than those ponderous ones from Punch, it’s really E. B. White’s verbal punch that makes it work.

  Perhaps the ultimate coup de grâce, both in style and substance, to the old two-line formula was provided by James Thurber, who in one fell swoop, in 1932, pared the caption down to not just a single line but a single word.

  “Touché!”

  This perfect melding of an enigmatic image in need of humorous clarification by a one-line caption became the hallmark of New Yorker cartoons. The best of these functioned as mini comic theater, complete with actors, sets, and props, with the right caption kicking it all home.

  “I can’t smell a thing either.”

  The caption of the following cartoon, by Peter Arno, from 1941, joined “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it” as a contribution to the American vernacular. “Back to the drawing board” was not a cliché before this cartoon was published.

  “Well, back to the old drawing board.”

  Arno’s great caption is now a standard response to any situation that does not turn out as planned. It aptly described the situation I was in. My frontal assault on Fortress New Yorker had not gotten me in, and I was back at the drawing board, looking for inspiration to keep my aspiration alive.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DECONSTRUCTING NEW YORKER CARTOONS

  Determined to educate myself on what a New Yorker cartoon was, and what mine weren’t, I took myself off to the New York Public Library. There, the collected volumes of The New Yorker included every issue, and therefore every cartoon, published up until that time.
I planned to look at all of them. There was some familial precedent to this quest because of the role the library had played in my father’s education.

  He grew up on a Lower East Side straight out of Hester Street. He had little formal education, having left school in the eighth grade to help support his family. But you wouldn’t know it to talk to him. Impressed with his erudition on a wide range of topics, people would often ask him where he’d gone to college. He always answered, wryly and proudly, “The New York Public Library.”

  Here I was, decades later, using the library as my cartoon college, bent on becoming not only a cartoonist but, as I had half-facetiously told my mother, also a cartoonologist, scientifically (or at least pseudoscientifically) investigating the variables that made New Yorker cartoons what they were. And as I marched through the decades from the 1920s up to the 1970s, looking for the path to New Yorker cartoonhood, I had an epiphany: there was no such thing as a typical New Yorker cartoon. They could have very short captions

  “Curiosity.”

  or very long ones

  “Edgar, please run down to the shopping center right away, and get some milk and cat food. Don’t get canned tuna, or chicken, or liver, or any of those awful combinations. Shop around and get a surprise. The pussies like surprises.”

  or none at all.

  The humor could be whimsical,

  “I don’t know. George got it somewhere.”

  satirical,

  “Aren’t you being a little arrogant, son? Here’s Lieutenant Colonel Farrington, Major Stark, Caption Truelove, Lieutenant Castle, and myself, all older and more experienced than you, and we think the war is very moral.”

  philosophical,

  or just interesting.

  I later learned that The New Yorker doesn’t call a cartoon a cartoon. The material of interest is referred to as a “drawing.” And because it’s a drawing, not a cartoon, it doesn’t necessarily have to be funny. Interesting is enough, if you’re as interesting as William Steig

  or Saul Steinberg.

  But whatever the form or content of the cartoons, the one common thread that ran through all of those I studied in the New York Public Library was that they made the reader think.

  You had to be a participant in the experience, up-to-date on the latest trends and buzzwords, aware of the world around you, and possessing a mental flexibility able to appreciate different comic visions, techniques, and talents.

  Two of those talents, Saul Steinberg and James Thurber, particularly inspired me; Steinberg appealed to my rationality and Thurber to my whimsicality.

  Steinberg’s cartoons didn’t cause an outward laugh or even an inward one, but they made my mind smile. Each one was a philosophical mediation in ink.

  Cartoons like this resonated with me because many of the cartoons I was doing were also “concept” cartoons; their aim was to be intellectually amusing rather than simply funny.

  Thurber provided a different kind of inspiration—actually, two kinds. First, his flavor of funny wasn’t like the traditional gag.

  His captions didn’t make sense of the image. Instead, the caption made what was going on stranger and, if you were on the Thurber wavelength, funnier.

  “That’s my first wife up there, and this is the present Mrs. Harris.”

  “I brought a couple of midgets—do you mind?”

  Thurber’s jokes were not the type you “get” in that classic way where you suddenly put two different frames of reference together and therefore are able to understand why the former Mrs. Harris is up there on the bookshelf. And trying to figure out where the midgets came from or, for that matter, why they made you giggle, wasn’t going to get you anywhere. It was go-with-the-flow humor in which you enjoyed absurdity by giving yourself over to it.

  That approach appealed to my wacky side and encouraged me to, well, have a whack at it. My absurdity was different from Thurber’s because weirdness by definition, if truly weird, needs to be idiosyncratic.

  “Good work, Bevans, but in this business climate I’ve got to ask myself the question ‘Is a choreography department absolutely essential?’”

  Though none of these made it into The New Yorker, a few of their quirky brethren eventually got there.

  “All you need is a bicycle pump, an ordinary deck of playing cards, and a pair of deerskin slippers, and you’re ready to begin.”

  The second way Thurber inspired me was, paradoxically, by his apparent lack of drawing ability. Look, if the requirement for admission to The New Yorker was that I would have to draw as well as Addams, Arno, George Price,

  “Watch out, Fred! Here it comes again!”

  or Charles Saxon,

  “What would you do if you had a million dollars—tax-free, I mean?”

  well, that was going to be too high a bar for someone who couldn’t even make the Music and Art honor roll. But Thurber’s drawing ability was considerably less daunting. It looked amateurish by any academic standard, including that of my old high school. In fact, to get into M&A I’d had to submit a portfolio that included drawings of the human figure, and if those figures had looked anything like Thurber’s homunculi, I never would have been admitted.

  When a critic once said Thurber was a “fifth-rate” artist, The New Yorker’s editor, Harold Ross, wryly corrected him: “Third-rate.” But that third-rate drawing style produced some of The New Yorker’s most memorable cartoons.

  “All right, have it your way—you heard a seal bark!”

  “Well, it makes a difference to me!”

  What I needed was a style as suited to my ideas as Thurber’s was to his.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FINDING MY STYLE

  I actually tried the Thurber approach early on. This was the first cartoon I ever sold, to Saturday Review in 1974—just a minimalist line drawing employing my very own homunculi.

  “Faster than a speeding bullet … More powerful than a locomotive … No shorthand?”

  Here’s another early one. But now, besides lines, another feature had crept in. Dots.

  “My main fear used to be cats—now it’s carcinogens.”

  I might say I eventually found my style by connecting the dots; however, the opposite was the case.

  Creating images using dots, or stippling, had a long tradition in illustration but none in cartooning. I’ve always thought that “stippling” sounds sort of like a dermatological disease.

  “Bad news, Mr. Mankoff—this is the worst case of stippling I’ve ever seen.”

  I did have a pretty bad case of it, going back to my time at Music and Art. There, in a History of Art class, I’d come in contact with the work of the impressionist Georges Seurat, who’d created his paintings in a style called pointillism.

  Now, that seemed a crazy way to paint or draw, though maybe not so crazy, because when I looked at photographs in magazines and newspapers, I saw that when enlarged, they were actually made up of tiny dots. So I started using dots to make my own distorted versions of them.

  At that time, it was just a type of dot doodling of photograph-inspired faces.

  This eventually morphed into my cartoon style.

  Even though drawing cartoons this way took a long time, it did have its advantages. First, since no one had ever drawn cartoons using this style, it was certain to get the attention of editors. Generally, I think this worked in my favor, although I remember receiving a note from one editor saying my ideas were good, but could I redraw them in a less cumbersome style? Only when I did that, it turned out that the ideas weren’t good enough. Damn editors, impossible to please. I know, now that I’m one of them.

  I created the dots with this instrument, a technical drawing pen called a Rapidograph. It was certainly ironically named,

  as far as I was concerned, because the time it took me to do a cartoon with it was anything but rapid.

  In this cartoon, using the tiniest pen tip available, I created every tone from lightest gray to blackest black with tiny dots.

 
“Please tell the king, I’ve remembered the punch line.”

  Honestly, the style was a pain in the neck. Eventually I had to modify it because of real physical pains, but when I was starting out, in addition to getting the attention of editors, it had another advantage: it forced me to be at the drawing board for many hours. A cartoon like this would take a whole dotting day. Which was okay, because time spent drawing