by Mankoff, Bob
So that’s how I get 90 percent of my ideas. Some come other ways, and I’ll take ’em any way I can, but mostly it’s this rational, relentless pursuit. Doodling seems like an unnecessary step, and, honestly, my mind-set when I’m drawing isn’t really a creative mind-set. It’s a mundane-task mind-set, like when I’m folding laundry or doing dishes. Sure, a cartoon can flit into my mind while I’m doing those kinds of tasks, but it’s rare and I’m better off doing dishes than doodles, because if it doesn’t happen at least I’ll have clean dishes. I need that more than I need another stack of Diffee doodles.
Even though Jack and Matt are on different sides of the doodle-first/word-first divide, they are both what I call “cartoon firsters,” in that they draw their inspiration more from previous cartoons, their own and others, than from the “real” world. This is the great and enduring cartoon game, in which genres such as cavemen, Ahab and the white whale, and beached whales become cartoon tropes manipulated for their own sake and not as commentary. In this game, each good idea that gets published becomes part of the collective cartoon unconscious. At a certain point, a genre—desert islands, grim reapers, suicidal lemmings, whatever—reaches a critical mass, and there is then enough idea fuel to sustain it indefinitely.
A great advantage of genre cartoons is that when you’re doing your batch, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. So, using myself as an example of someone employing this method, here are some cartoons about inventing the wheel.
I first drew (1) two stone wheels, one round and one square. I didn’t know where I would go with this, but I knew that it would enable me to start associating them with different frames of reference. I quickly associated the “square” wheel with two things: a bad car, or “clunker,” and a prototype of the round wheel.
I melded the square and round wheels together in one structure (2), thereby creating an incongruity—something out of place, odd, or surprising that provokes a tension that needs to be resolved by the caption. I came up with a caption: “The back part I call ‘the wheel,’ the front part ‘the brake.’” Once I wrote that caption, I thought it would also be incongruous if the guy who invented the wheel called it fire (3). Dumb, but I found it funny, and a lot of humor is just playing dumb. This type of mislabeling is actually one of the first ways children make jokes. They call a dog a cat and so on.
I had early on made the association with fire as one of the inventions we think of when we consider the wheel, so I drew a wheel on fire and labeled it a “twofer” invention (4). I knew that joke would need work and figured I’d come back to it later.
In the final joke I imagined the wheel as a car a teenager might want to borrow (5). But that would only be the final joke for this session. Any one of these five jokes could be expanded—maybe not ad infinitum but certainly ad nauseam, so I’ll stop for now.
In contrast to the cartoon firsters are what I call the reality firsters. They might start with words or images and can employ the classic genres or not, but the humor in their cartoons relates to the real world, whether events in the news or their own personal lives. The cartooning work ethic doesn’t change—these cartoonists also put in a lot of time—but the motivating forces behind the ideas is different. One way to identify someone from this school of cartooning is to ask yourself how much you can infer of the cartoonist’s personality and worldview from their cartoons. From Jack and Matt’s drawings, I would venture only that they are imaginative and funny.
But the cartoons of someone like Roz Chast are much more revealing. While Roz’s early cartoons were in the absurdist mode and let on little about her except that she had a brilliantly idiosyncratic sense of humor,
as time went by, absurdity converged with anxiety, giving us a window into her alternative universe.
Here’s how she converts the troubling into the comical:
The deadline I have set for myself is Tuesday evening. I generally turn in from five to eight drawings. Some of mine are a full page or even two pages. That still counts as one drawing to me, because it’s still one idea.
During the week, I jot cartoon ideas down: conversations I overhear, random things that suddenly seem funny to me, something idiotic I’ve just done, whatever seems like it could turn into a cartoon. But I don’t sit down at my desk to actually work on the batch until Monday. If I work too many days before the deadline, I start worrying and fuss with drawings until I tear them up.
So Monday and Tuesday are my New Yorker batch days. I sit at my desk, drawing, writing, and thinking, from (late) morning till evening. Coffee is good. E-mail is not so good. A quiet room, not too hot and not too cold, is very, very good. I like to give myself enough time to work, but not so much that I get overanalytical and start arguments with myself. On those days, I don’t make other plans, I don’t work on other projects, I don’t go out to lunch. I try not to get distracted, so I can give myself over to that frame of mind where maybe something interesting will happen.
David Sipress looks out at the world to connect it with his own inner reality.
I search for cartoon ideas in a variety of ways, the most deliberative of which is sitting at my desk and thinking—thinking about experiences in the recent past, or the distant past, or perhaps some feeling or thought I’m having at that very moment. Let’s say I’ve been worrying about the day of my annual physical, which is fast approaching; I might try to come with an idea about annual physicals, or doctors, or death, or even one about worrying itself—anxiety is for me perhaps the richest source of ideas:
“Try thinking about something else.”
Or let’s say I’ve just read something in the newspaper that angered me. I will search my mind for a way I can take that reaction and use it to make a comment about how I imagine everyone feels about the news item in question, juxtaposing it with an image or a setting that is surprising and unexpected:
“Congratulations, sire—your financial reforms have been successful!”
Now and then I end up with an idea that has absolutely nothing to do with what I started out thinking I was going to make a cartoon about. The best ideas come this way, seemingly without any help from me—they pass through me and on to the drawing pad before I realize what’s happening. For example, after a long, frustrating morning of trying to come up with something, anything, about my annual physical, I decided to give up and order lunch—something vegetarian and healthy—so I picked up the Bedouoin Café take-out menu, and next thing I knew, I had drawn this cartoon about the Middle East situation right on the menu:
“Why is it we never focus on the things that unite us, like falafel?”
This division between the realists and the fantasists is by no means black-and-white—and, since it’s The New Yorker, certainly not fifty shades of gray. Reality-based cartoonists occasionally take a vacation in gagland.
And the masters of the gag can use the genres to comment on something more than other cartoons.
“Of course it would be a different story entirely if we could extract crude oil from stem cells.”
Regardless of how cartoonists do what they do, a lot gets done. All of which ends up on my desk on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE CARTOON DEPARTMENT
I look at about five hundred cartoons a week from our regular contributors and the same amount from others who would like to be regular contributors. Eventually I cull the pile down to fifty or so, which I’ll take to the Wednesday afternoon cartoon meeting with David Remnick.
There are four major ways we receive cartoon submissions: by hand, mail, e-mail, and fax. Very few arrive by sea these days. The hand deliveries come on Tuesday mornings, and the hands delivering them are the cartoonists’.
Zach Kanin, here, seems reluctant to give his batch up, but with a practiced twist of the wrist I cleverly extract it from his grasp.
Tuesday is open-call day at the Cartoon Department, and on a busy day it can seem more like a cattle call, with cartoonists of all stripes milling about.
They’re supposed to come in and see me in the order in which they arrive, but since no one ever keeps track, I usually end up shouting, “Next please, even if you’re not!”
In dealing with established talent, like the venerable, if sometimes irascible, Sam Gross,
it’s more about schmoozing and lending an ear to his complaints—which usually revolve around the sad state of magazine cartooning and/or his prostate, not necessarily in that order—rather than me critiquing his work. Sam has been called “the ultimate gag cartoonist” and has certainly earned that title with his more than twenty-eight thousand drawings, all of which he has meticulously numbered on the back.
I haven’t seen all of them; they go way, way back, some to the early 1960s. The one I’m looking at here, originally No. 6193, was probably done in the ’80s. But when Sam decides that one of these, as he calls them, “golden oldies” has held up over the years, he brings it in and gives it a new number.
The cartoon in the photo is one such Sam has tweaked to bring it up to date. It shows a prisoner who is being addressed by a military drone. I don’t remember what the caption was, but I pointed out to Sam that he needed to draw a better drone because this one looked like a tiny spaceship. Sam brushed my comment off with “If you buy it, I’ll draw it better.” Well, we didn’t and he didn’t, but Sam, with over twenty-eight thousand cartoons under his belt, and maybe even more stuffed in his socks and underwear, is not likely to be discouraged by some comparatively youngish punk like me. Sam is completely his own man, doing his cartoons not for me or for The New Yorker but for himself. To quote Sam from an interview he gave to The Comics Journal:
I don’t do anything for The New Yorker because I operate on the premise that Bob Mankoff can be there today and gone tomorrow, and the same with David Remnick. Somebody else could come in and have a totally different outlook, and I will either fit in or not fit in. If I’ve geared my work toward the people that were there before, I’m basically embedded with these older people and I’m screwed. But I am my own person. You either take me or leave me, simple as that.
But it’s not as simple as that with a very new talent, like Liam Walsh.
Nor should it be. He’s certainly his own person, but he’s not yet sure of what kind of cartoonist that person should be. I’m here to help him find out. Although self-taught, he is quite an accomplished artist. And I see in him a possibility of reviving the purely visual kind of cartoon that was popular in the 1940s and ’50s. Here are some examples of his work:
Liam can’t take Sam’s “take it or leave it” approach because that would leave him without a career as a cartoonist. He’s talented, but he needs help. So, for example, when he submits this “rough,”
he’s playing off the complaints box cartoon theme we’ve used in the past but putting it a personal context. I’ve done that myself.
“Look, I’m not denying the validity of your grievances. I just think they’d be better addressed at home, Helen.”
But there was too much going on in Liam’s gag, and it was missing a truth factor. I thought that the truth could be found by making this joke not about an absurdist complaint—tuba playing in bed—but about real complaints a woman might have. So I suggested that he change it into an après-sex situation. That would require a younger couple as well as some additional cues in line with what is suitable for The New Yorker. We settled on the marginally transparent negligee and grudgingly on the somewhat anachronistic cigarette as being still the clearest shorthand for postcoital sex.
And so it goes on Tuesdays: schmoozing with the old-timers, mentoring the new-timers, and dealing with everyone betwixt and between those extremes who’s submitting cartoons, whether in person or over the electronic transom.
I bring to the cartoon meeting with David Remnick the fifty that will eventually be whittled down to the seventeen or so that will make it into the magazine. As we’ll find out, David is an excellent whittler.
This means that many very good cartoons don’t make it. I’ve got to be comfortable with that or else find a magazine that can publish five hundred a week. We could squeeze in quite a bit more if we removed all the articles, but that would be a huge loss. One I could live with, but still huge, and David might object, not to mention a few readers.
So, how do I look at five hundred cartoons and then pick the one in ten that should move on to the next phase? Simple: I have a laugh meter in my office that records my response to each cartoon; this is then transmitted wirelessly to my computer, which ranks them according to proprietary algorithms and spits out the results.
Yeah, I wish, but even if I had one it wouldn’t record much, if any, laughter. There are two reasons for this. The first is that evaluating humor is different from enjoying it. When you’re comparing one ostensibly funny thing to another supposedly funny thing in an effort to suss out the funniest, the cognitive effort of deciding interferes with the emotional reaction that causes laughter. Let me show you what I mean. Take this survey, in which the alternative captions come from one of our caption contests.
See what I mean? The comparing and deciding tends to short-circuit the laughter. The other laughter-inhibiting factor is that whether it’s you comparing captions or me comparing cartoons, it’s being done alone. People rarely laugh out loud when they’re alone. Misery may love company, but real merriment requires it.
Okay, now that I have your sympathy, back to my lonely task. Here are the few rules of thumb I rely on. And if they don’t work, well, I have other fingers.
RULE 1: Originality is overrated. Familiarity may breed contempt in other areas, but when it comes to cartoons, it breeds contentment. Cartoons are first and foremost entertainment. All entertainment forms have their genres. The movies have comedies, westerns, horror flicks, and film noirs. TV has sitcoms, police procedurals, and soap operas. Even highfalutin poetry has sonnets, couplets, and epics. Within the familiarity of the form, you’re free to experiment.
That’s how it is with our cartoons. The cultured readership of The New Yorker like novelty in their humor, but they like it nestled within the comforting cocoon of familiarity. Our genre cartoons, such as castaways on the desert island,
“I miss the palm tree, also, but at least we can have a refrigerator.”
St. Peter at heaven’s gate,
“Wait, those weren’t lies. That was spin!”
and our old friend the grim reaper provide that foundation.
“Thank goodness you’re here—I can’t accomplish anything unless I have a deadline.”
Once the familiarity is in place, the cartoon can be evolved, increasing its novelty. The evolution cartoon cliché itself is a good illustration. Here are some snapshots of it as it evolves over a fifty-year span, from 1955 to 2005, becoming progressively more surreal.
That last one, by Tom Cheney, is way-off-the-charts weird, but it works because of what’s gone before it. Speaking of charts, let’s go back to one I’ve used before for the next rule.
RULE 2. Don’t compare funny apples with funny oranges or, for God’s sake, with funny pears.
They’re different flavors of funny, and each should be savored for what it is, not what it’s not. There’s no point in judging cartoons based in reality, that have a point to make, by the same yardstick you use for gag cartoons, whose only point is being funny. “Gettable” gag cartoons, in which the incongruity is made sense of, are a different animal—or, in the above case, fruit—from those whose objective is just enjoyable nonsense. The different flavors of funny are like a smorgasbord of humor, making each one tastier. So, as every waiter exhorts us now, enjoy!
RULE 3. Sorry, it’s been done. At this point, we’ve published more than seventy-eight thousand cartoons. Invariably cartoonists will submit ideas that have been done before or are quite similar to previous ones. Rarely is the idea identical, but that, too, happens.
“Sure it’s been done, but not lately.”
“Let me through—I’m the victim!”
I did
this cartoon in 1993, and a number of cartoonists have, since I’ve been editor, submitted the same cartoon caption to me. The most recent was from David Sipress.
