by Mankoff, Bob
When Elaine doesn’t buy the “gossamer” defense, Elinoff flails about, adding to his claim that the cartoon is “a rather clever jab at interoffice politics” by saying it’s “a comment on contemporary mores,” “a slice of life,” and “a pun.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with these categories. I’ve used all of them in my own work.
Slice of life:
“Wait a minute—I know there’s something we’ve forgotten to worry about.”
Comment on contemporary mores:
“One question: If this is the Information Age, how come nobody knows anything?”
Pun:
However, these categories don’t apply to the fake cartoon in question, and Elaine’s withering cross-examination eventually flushes out the editor’s real reason for publishing the cartoon.
Hey, we like the kitty, too. Who doesn’t? In fact, we’ve liked the kitty enough to publish not one but two books full of them.
But our kitties aren’t just LOL cats trafficking in their cuteness.
They are thinking cats:
who make us think more about ourselves.
“Never, ever, think outside the box.”
Still, like the fake New Yorker with the fake cartoon in the episode, we do have cartoons with cats and dogs in an office.
“Let’s face it: you and this organization have never been a good fit.”
“Beg.”
The transparency of the humor in these cartoons belies the premise of the Seinfeld episode. Even so, the premise is not completely unreasonable. If it were, it wouldn’t be funny. Elaine has company in real life. That’s why we have run this feature in our annual cartoon issue:
To get the joke of some of these cartoons, you just have to put together the different frames of reference.
“Pi what squared? Long John, you should be able to get this.”
In the above case, the frames are high school geometry and stereotypical pirate talk.
Pirate One: “Arr, matey, do ye need more treasure?”
Pirate Two: “Arr, I do.”
(And just to be proactive here, I want to apologize in advance for stereotyping pirates. I know that sounds redundant, but in these sensitive times it doesn’t hurt to be proactively proactive.)
New Yorker cartoons are not meant to be an IQ test, but they are intelligent humor, which requires a certain amount of cultural literacy to appreciate. So, for example, if your cultural literacy doesn’t extend to the baseball sign a catcher gives when he wants the pitcher to walk the batter and the fact that a dog wagging his tail often means he wants to go for a walk, you won’t find this cartoon funny.
But that mashing-frames-together method won’t work for this cartoon, an early flight of fancy by Roz Chast, from 1980:
For this cartoon, Elinoff’s defense
has a certain plausibility, and echoes the famous comment about humor by E. B. White that I quoted in my introduction and bears requoting here: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”
Many years ago, Max Eastman wrote a book called Enjoyment of Laughter, which completely ignored White’s advice. Eastman’s basic point was that humor is a kind of play, and that if you don’t understand that and accept it, you won’t enjoy humor.
Play is not the default mode of life; seriousness is. But play is the default mode in cartooning. What cartoonists do is play with incongruities along a continuum stretching from reality-based humor to nonsense, then invite you to play along with them. Where on the continuum the invitation is placed often determines how you RSVP.
In this diagram, A is realistic humor and B is not, but both are completely “gettable,” while C isn’t. C doesn’t produce that jolt you get when you suddenly understand a joke. It’s not totally random, though. There is some method to its madness. C uses the classic triplet structure of a joke.
“You’re right—things are funnier in threes.”
The triad is “hacksaw,” “green glitter,” and “flounder”—three terms you will find together only in one place when you do a Google search, and that place is Harry Bliss’s cartoon. So, even though the cartoon is far along on the incongruity dimension, its style of Mad Libs humor is not completely foreign. After all, most people have played Mad Libs. But Roz’s cartoon offers no such familiarity and takes many people out of their comic comfort zone:
Including cartoonists. When Roz’s cartoon first came out, it provoked outrage among some cartoonists, who thought its appearance in the magazine sounded the death knell for traditional gag cartooning. Well, gag cartooning is still with us some thirty years later and so, of course, is Roz, who has established her own tradition.
Interestingly, the outrage Elaine expressed at her meeting with Elinoff is directed at classic genre cartoons.
In response to Elaine’s criticism, Elinoff responds by complimenting her on the very premise she is deriding.
The flattery quickly causes Elaine to change her tune and proudly proclaim,
Which brings us to the next part of the episode.
When Jerry doesn’t accede to the gemlike quality of the cartoon, Elaine presses on, trying to explain its luster. Now it’s a role reversal from when Elinoff was attempting to explain the New Yorker cartoon to her.
Let’s see if she does any better.
At first Elaine goes for the incongruity justification, saying that the pig’s complaint is “not normal.” That’s absolutely true on many levels. First off, pigs are notorious noncomplainers. They may not be as contented as cows, but there is the expression “Happy as a pig in Vorshtein.” Ah, got you on that one, didn’t I? You were expecting some other word, and “Vorshtein” was surprising and incongruous in that context, just as it was when Elinoff used it as a category of humor.
Most people would agree that humor involves an idea, image, or text that is in some sense incongruous, unusual, unexpected, surprising, or, as Elaine says, “not normal.” But “not normal” is not enough even when there is lots of not normalcy, as in Elaine’s cartoon. To wit: pigs don’t complain, and even if they did it wouldn’t be about their height, and even then it wouldn’t occur in a department store. So we have incongruity raised to the third power but still no joke.
Incongruity may be a necessary condition for humor, but it’s not sufficient. The different frames of reference have to be connected, even if only tangentially.
The Vorshtein gag in the episode is like that. The name Vorshtein sounds crazy but also sounds right. As if it might belong to some eminent Dr. Vorshtein with his eponymous Vorshtein effect, known to explain all that had been previously inexplicable, like humor and Libor rates.
Had Elinoff said “crab cakes” instead of “Vorshtein,” it would have been even more incongruous but not funny. Had he said “Koestler,” it also wouldn’t have been funny but at least the reference would have relevance for humor theorists.
Arthur Koestler, perhaps best known for his anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon, also wrote an interesting book called The Act of Creation, in which he linked the creative processes behind humor, art, and science. For humor he coined the terms “bisociation” to refer to the mental process involved in perceiving humorous incongruity.
Bisociation is like a mash-up in your mind, when you simultaneously associate an idea or object with two fields ordinarily not regarded as related. The pun is perhaps the simplest form of humorous bisociation, and it’s what Jerry uses when he takes a stab at a caption.
That satisfies Koestler’s criteria for humor because it brings together two different meanings of “sty” simultaneously. Having a pig as the protagonist in a cartoon lends itself to that punning sort of thing.
“Your constant cries to cut the pork sadden me, Senator.”
But now Elaine is the unsatisfied one, and she complains that Jerry’s caption is too “jokey.” Then, taking another page from Elinoff’s playbook, Elaine positions her cartoon as a “slice of life,” saying of her caption, “That’s nic
e. That’s real.” That contradicts her earlier justification of it being not normal, but that doesn’t matter. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and the bane of rapid-fire dialogue humor, which Seinfeld excels at. That’s why Jerry can easily do a 180 from his previous assessment of the cartoon as “Pretty good.”
I’m with Jerry on this one. The cartoon does stink. It doesn’t make any sense, which makes perfect sense because that is the whole premise of the episode, the alleged inscrutability of New Yorker cartoons.
If Elaine had submitted that cartoon to me, I would have advised her to make the cartoon more scrutable by losing the pig and changing the complainer to a shortish guy. And instead of complaints, maybe have the department be called “Adjustments,” as though his height could be “adjusted.” Not a great cartoon by any means, but at least not the dreaded “woolly.”
That is hypothetical, however, and not because Elaine is just a sitcom character but because that’s just not the way it’s done. In all the years I’ve been cartoon editor, we’ve never published a cartoon by someone like Elaine. Why? Simple: she’s not a cartoonist. Just as novelists are the people who produce novels, cartoonists are where cartoons come from.
Not that so-called civilians don’t pitch me cartoons. That happens to all cartoonists, but being cartoon editor of The New Yorker, with the accompanying status that entails, also means that you get pitched by some pretty high-status people—and even an occasional famous novelist or playwright. For instance, one day my assistant told me that Norman Mailer was on the phone and would like to speak to me.
“I’m sure he’s got the wrong department,” I said. “Probably wants Fiction.”
“No, he wants to talk to you about his cartoons. He says he’d like to come in to show you his cartoons.”
I agreed. When he arrived, I said, “Really, Mr. Mailer, you do cartoons?”
To which he replied, “I wouldn’t call them cartoons, exactly.”
Exactly.
Well, at least they weren’t a couple of bears talking about the stock market. He later published them in a book called Modest Gifts. Let’s just say it was a very apt title.
Shortly after I became cartoon editor, David Mamet sent me this note:
I sent a note back to him, thanking him and saying I had taken the liberty of sending him a play.
I know that anecdotes like these make me seem like a snotty smart-ass, and I plead guilty; but—and this won’t be news to you by now—I take cartoons very seriously, and I expect the people who draw them to do the same.
I previously made the analogy between The New Yorker and the New York Yankees, explaining that getting into The New Yorker as a cartoonist is the equivalent of getting signed by the Yankees as a baseball player. So coming into my office and basically saying you’d like to give this cartoon thing a try is like showing up at the stadium requesting a tryout.
This is not to say that only cartoonists can come up with a good idea for a cartoon. As I’ve mentioned, gag writers used to think up funny ideas that were then drawn by cartoonists. But back then, gag writing itself was a job, like writing for a sitcom is today.
And, yes, even nonprofessionals can think of something funny for Elaine’s two bears at the cocktail party to say. That’s why we created the cartoon caption contest, to give budding Elaines a way to channel their inner cartoonist. In fact, in the spirit of turnabout is fair play, we took Elaine’s setup and used it for one of our caption contests. Of course, hundreds of Seinfeld aficionados played along and entered Elaine’s caption, but we were actually looking for a good caption, and we found it with this winning entry:
“Stop sending me spam!”
The caption contest is one of the magazine’s most popular features. Now, be patient: I’m going to devote an entire chapter to telling you all about it and how to increase your chances of winning (marginally).
However, as popular as the contest is, this type of crowdsourcing is not the way we “toon” The New Yorker each week. To start off, we use another crowd—our crowd, New Yorker cartoonists.
CHAPTER TEN
TOONING THE NEW YORKER: WHERE CARTOONS COME FROM
Each cartoon that ends up in The New Yorker starts in the mind of a cartoonist. Cartoonists know that their job is to come up with, on average, ten cartoons each week, more or less but not too much less. “Less is more” may be a good motto for some art forms, but cartooning is not one of them. Generally speaking, the more cartoons you submit, the greater the chance that one of them will be selected. To get good ideas in any field, the best method is to generate lots of ideas and throw out the bad ones. Different cartoonists have different ways of getting quality from quantity.
One division is between the doodle firsters and the word firsters. The doodle firsters doodle away until a drawing inspires something funny, while the words first people write, write, and write some more until something clicks.
“How are you fixed for oats?”
Jack Ziegler is definitely a doodle firster. Here’s his description of the genesis of a cartoon, using this one as an example:
I’m sitting in a comfortable chair, doodling on a clipboard in search of an idea. I’m on my second or third cup of morning joe. I try not to raise my eyes from the blank sheet of paper on the clipboard because there are too many distractions in the room—and I’m easily distracted. If I allow my eyes to light on any of the spines of any of the books, LPs, or CDs on the shelves that surround me, I’m a goner. Not to mention the pictures on the walls, mostly framed cartoon originals accumulated over the years from friends in the profession. If I look up, I know there’ll be one of these pictures that needs straightening, and if I give in to that urge, I’m just asking for that Jesse James moment: the bullet in the back from that dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard, which would be the biggest distraction of all.
I’m trying to come up with cartoon ideas. I find that if I have nothing written down already—a preconceived idea or setup, say—I generally start my doodling process, my search for something tangible, by drawing a man’s head. Sometimes the face will look like there’s something going on just out of my eyesight. What is it? I have no idea, but I go ahead and attempt to draw it anyway. Today I’m looking at this guy’s head from a three-quarter angle behind him. I give him a cowboy hat, because is there any person more fun to draw than a cowboy? Probably not. I should probably put him on a horse. The horse I’ve drawn seems to be looking down, so maybe he’s high up on a hill that both of them, in their prairie wanderings, have just happened upon. There’s obviously something down there in the valley below. I’ve dressed my cowboy in a jacket that looks vaguely modern. Possibly shearling? Kinda screams Ralph Lauren in a western mojo, doesn’t it? It’s then just a short, logical hop of the imagination from that jacket to a shopping mall, isn’t it? So I draw the mall down there in the valley, surrounded by a lot full of cars. What’s the cowboy going to do? Rein his horse off to the right in order to skirt the mall? Or will he succumb to an urge to shop? And if that’s the case, shopping for whom? His wife? Girlfriend? Himself? Nope.
For me, an idea for a cartoon generally springs from a tiny germ, which I keep adding to until it builds into something that slowly begins to make a semblance of sense. Sometimes this construction project can be quite elaborate and consume an hour or more but ultimately lead to a dead end. Other times it can take a mere few minutes and get me somewhere worthwhile. Either way, the journey can be fun, and occasionally I find a jackpot at the end.
The cartoonist Matt Diffee’s journey, aside from a similar dependence on coffee, takes a different, word-firster route.
I don’t doodle. I’ve got nothing against folks who do, but I’ve never come up with a decent cartoon idea that way. When I need an idea, which is always, I sit down with a full pot of coffee and a blank sheet of paper and I write. I’ll jot down a phrase I’ve heard or just a single word. It can be something that feels sorta funny to me or not. It’s just something to get the process started.
Occasionally it’ll be words that describe an image or concept—like, I might write down “dog afraid of vacuum cleaner” or “two beavers talking,” but I never draw those things until I’ve actually got a joke idea.
A good example of how this typically works is in this cartoon:
I started by jotting down the words “writer’s block.” For some reason, these words pop into my head a lot during writing sessions, as do the phrases “I got nothing” and “I should have gone to law school.” Anyway, I started by playing with those words. First I thought of alternative meanings of the words themselves. So “writer’s block” could be a city block where writers live. It could be writers playing with children’s building blocks, or a football block performed by a writer. You can see there’s probably a joke to be had among those options, but I don’t think it would be a very good one. Might be more “punny” than funny. You could mess around with the “writer” part of the phrase, too, and make it “rider’s block.” You could take that as far as you wanted and get “horse rider’s block” or “subway rider’s block.” I don’t think I pursued that angle very much. I mostly thought in terms of replacing the “writer” with another occupation. I jotted down things like “dentist’s block,” “taxidermist’s block,” “proctologist’s block,” “ventriloquist’s block,” and then a bunch of occupations that end in “-er,” like “plumber’s block” and “butcher’s block” (which has its own punny potential). In the end, I found the gag by successively adding words to the phrase. Where can you add words to it? In the middle? Not really. At the end? “Writer’s block and tackle.” “Writer’s blockade.” At the beginning? Sure, “copywriter’s block,” “grant writer’s block.” Then eventually I came to “skywriter’s block”—Bam, there’s the idea. And it came fully intact. I immediately saw the whole image exactly how I ended up drawing it here. That’s the best part of doing this for a living: going from the moment when you have no idea at all to the moment when you have an idea. In a way, I think it’s the same experience for the reader, except it happens a lot faster. Hopefully.