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

by Mankoff, Bob

  “Let me through—I’m the victim!”

  It’s obviously not plagiarism, because it would be pretty dumb to submit a cartoon you know has already been done—and by your editor, no less. Most probably David just came up with the same reductio ad absurdum tweak of the well-traveled trope that I did.

  “Let me through! I’m a businessperson!”

  “Let me through. I’m a lawyer.”

  “Let me through! I’m a critic.”

  As further proof of this concept, there are times when the same cartoon or very similar cartoons are submitted by different cartoonists during the same week. This just happened last week, with Liam Walsh

  and Paul Noth.

  “Okay. Where is he?”

  In this particular instance, it was easy to choose between the two because Paul’s was much subtler and, as you know by now, we’re a sucker for subtlety.

  But there is also the phenomenon of unconscious plagiarism, where you completely forget an idea you’ve seen and then it pops into your head as your own. Usually, along with the pop a little bell goes off and you have a feeling that it’s been done before—but not always.

  And finally, I have seen and even experienced unconscious autoplagiarism, where you come up with an idea you have already done, completely forgetting that you have done it. The excuse for all this, if excuse be needed, is that we’re cartoonists, not computers, and that’s what we need computers for.

  But cartoons don’t have to be exactly the same for the “It’s been done” rule to go into effect. We use our database to check for cartoons that, while not identical, are too similar. This submission, by Michael Crawford in 2013,

  “So many wounds, Sam, so little salt.”

  was much too close to this cartoon of Bill Haefeli’s, published in 2009:

  “Talk to me. You have wounds. I have salt.”

  Same for this submission by Mick Stevens,

  which came in not long after this one by Joe Dator was published:

  “My woman done left me, ran off with my best friend. Well, my woman done left me, said she ran off with my best friend. Details are sketchy at this time, so let’s go to Jennifer Diaz standing by in Washington.”

  RULE 4. Play favorites, as in favorite cartoonists. This is related to the familiarity rule. You’re most likely to find something funny if it comes from someone who’s been funny before. As soon your favorite comedian appears, you’re already put in a good mood that is halfway to a laugh. Our regular cartoonists produce the same effect; it’s a conditioning effect, like that used on Pavlov’s dog or my poor unfortunate rats.

  But there is more to it than this. The cartoons that appear in the magazine are not just a collection of cartoons; they are also a collection of cartoonists, each with his or her own comic voice.

  Even if on the same topic, that voice speaks differently when it belongs to Roz Chast,

  Jack Ziegler,

  Drew Dernavich,

  “When I can’t sleep, I find that it sometimes helps to get up and jot down my anxieties.”

  or moi.

  “I can’t sleep. I just got this incredible craving for capital.”

  And the more familiar we are with each voice, the better we hear what it has to say.

  RULE 5. Don’t play favorites so much that no one else gets to play. You can’t revere established talent to such a degree that no new talent can get established. But that talent is going to have to show something special to break through. They’re going to need to speak with their own voice and not just mimic someone else. For example, we get people submitting Roz Chast knockoffs all the time, as well as those of our other artists. Naturally, I tell them to knock it off.

  RULE 6. New news is good news. Timelessness is an excellent quality for a cartoon to have, but in a weekly magazine, especially one competing on Internet time, timeliness is also important. So I’m always looking for a few cartoons to take to David Remnick that are, as they say, “ripped from today’s headlines.”

  “PHYSICISTS FIND ELUSIVE PARTICLE SEEN AS KEY TO UNIVERSE”

  “Always the last place you look!”

  “SURVEY SHOWS GROWING STRENGTH OF E-BOOKS”

  “Nice, but as long as there are readers there will be scrolls.”

  RULE 7. Edit. After all, my title is not “cartoon selector” but “cartoon editor.” And although selection is the main thing I do, there is also editing. Most of the time, the editing is rather minor but still important.

  The original caption for this Ed Koren cartoon was “Did you procure the worm humanely?”

  “Wait—did you procure that worm humanely?”

  I thought the caption would benefit from more conflict and urgency and suggested to Ed that he make it “Wait—did you procure that worm humanely?” Ed agreed. David Remnick did also, and I hope you’re on board as well.

  Sometimes editing involves reconceptualizing the idea. Sidney Harris’s original caption for this cartoon

  was “True, it’s been revealed I have a second family, so I’ve decided to leave politics to spend more time with them.” With Sid’s okay, I changed it to “True, it’s been revealed that I have a second family, but, I assure you, I am a decent second-family man.”

  Here’s a more complicated example. When cartoonist Bob Eckstein originally showed me this drawing, I was a little confused by it.

  I eventually deduced that it was a spelling bee for alien kids. But the word “ymf” seemed too short for a spelling bee, even on an alien world. Also, if you have alien words, you can’t have ordinary base-ten numbers identifying the contestants. So Bob addressed both issues with this version, which we published:

  “Ywhubenqmfpki, Y-W-H-U-B-E-N-Q-M-F-P-K-I, ywhubenqmfpki.”

  Sometimes I think of a caption that’s just not right for my cartoon style or subject matter but perfect for someone else’s. In the following instance, cartoonist/fashionista Marisa Acocella Marchetto executed a caption I came up with far better than I ever could have:

  “And, in this corner, weighing five pounds more than she’d like…”

  Occasionally, and only with the cartoonist’s permission, I supply an entirely new caption for a drawing. Michael Maslin’s original caption for this cartoon was “I think mine’s bigger and I’m willing to prove it.”

  For some reason, probably because I half-remembered this cartoon by Leo Cullum,

  “Take this, Luke. They say it’s impossible to get a decent baguette west of the Pecos.”

  I made this visual association between the two images

  and came up with the caption “Yours may be bigger, but it’s a baguette.” I showed this to Michael and he responded, “An improvement, thanks! The word ‘baguette’ made me laugh.”

  This leads me to the final rule, which may be the most important one and is the topic for the next chapter.

  RULE 8. Make David Remnick laugh.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DAVID DECIDES

  The cartoon meeting takes place each Wednesday. David and I sit down in his office along with the managing editor, now Silvia Killingsworth, whose first function at the meeting is inventory management. Each week the fifteen to seventeen cartoons that will be published in the magazine come from a bank of about two hundred previously bought cartoons. Silvia makes sure that the bank is diverse in terms of topics, topicality, cartoonists, and layout sizes.

  She, being a young woman, also performs an important second function: providing a different perspective on the cartoons than David or I might have. This is especially true for cartoons about women, where David will often ask her jokingly, “Will the ladies like this?”

  And, just by being a third person, she performs a third function: creating a social atmosphere that encourages laughter. As I’ve said, it’s hard to laugh alone, and if it were just David and me at the meeting, he would basically be alone; humor has to involve some surprise, and I can’t be surprised by cartoons I’ve already seen.

  At this meeting, it’s time to pick the
cartoons that will go in the magazine. There is no one better to make this final decision than David. As opposed to my perhaps overly analytic outlook, David’s is much more intuitive and quick. It needs to be. He’s deciding not only which cartoons will appear in the magazine but also which covers, photos, and, of course, articles. I think the only thing he doesn’t personally get involved in is the numbering of the pages.

  Overall, David’s approach to cartoons is eclectic. He can appreciate a straightforward gag, pure zaniness, or nuanced observational humor. In other words, funny apples and oranges and pears can all make the cut.

  I truly believe that once I get to the batch of fifty cartoons for the meeting, the final decisions are somewhat subjective and arbitrary. They are not, however, subject to a lot of arbitration. Every once in a while I’ll go to bat for a cartoon I absolutely love but David doesn’t, and to settle it we thumb-wrestle—you wouldn’t believe how strong that man’s thumb is. Remember, though, that when I bring the cartoons to this meeting, I absolutely do at least like all of them. Thus I usually don’t have a go-to-the-mat feeling for one versus another.

  Still, at this point, someone has to believe that there are differences in quality between the cartoons he selects and those he doesn’t. This is not a task for a ditherer, and David doesn’t dither while doing it. There are three baskets on the table, labeled “Yes,” “No,” and “Maybe.” David picks up each cartoon and reads the caption. If he laughs, it goes into the “Yes” basket. If a bit of observational humor evokes a wry smile of recognition, that drawing will also often get the coveted “Yes” basket designation. A weak, questioning, one-side-of-the-mouth-raised smile—Is this good enough?—means a “Maybe” at best. Puzzlement or a frown always earn a “No.” Then he reviews the “Maybe” candidates. Sometimes a few of these hopefuls graduate to the “Yes” basket. As for the entries in the “No” basket, well, no really does mean no.

  David is able to laugh and smile at cartoons even as he’s evaluating them. It’s an admirable quality, one I don’t possess, but his laugh or smile is a nice validation that after my endless categorizing, analyzing, and theorizing, all the funny hasn’t fled the building.

  Still, this is definitely a role reversal for me, because now I’m the one pitching the ideas that can get rejected, including—gasp—my own. It’s a humbling experience for me, and it usually takes a good fifteen to twenty minutes afterward for my old arrogance to return. Here’s one of mine he turned down:

  “If these walls could talk, and they knew what was good for them, they would shut the fuck up.”

  Was? As David has said, “There are certain limits. There’s a language limit, a grossness limit, a juvenile limit.” And, I might add, a perfectly reasonable limit on the cartoon editor deciding which of his own cartoons get published. In reality, that is not much of an issue anymore. Since becoming editor, I’ve done fewer and fewer cartoons. Most weeks I don’t bring any of my own cartoons to the meeting, because I haven’t done any. Why? As I’ve indicated, cartooning is a full-time job, but it hasn’t been my full-time job for some time. I’ve gone from being a player-coach when I became editor to becoming more of a coach-player now with a lot of new players who need some coaching.

  Okay, now that that’s out of the way let’s get back to the meeting with me, David, and Silvia; it’s time to introduce the two hovering sepulchral presences of the legendary past, editors who established what is acceptable for the magazine to publish.

  If David starts to put an inappropriate cartoon in the “Yes” basket, the legends spring into action to prevent it.

  Admittedly, that is a bit fanciful, but David instinctively channels Ross and Shawn to determine what’s right for The New Yorker and also what’s wrongety wrong wrong.

  That standard has changed over time. For Shawn, any suggestion of real sex was taboo. And, needless to say, unmentionable bodily processes, like the upchucking Chuckles in the above cartoon, remained unmentioned. When Tina was editor, the propriety pendulum swung way in the other direction, eventually veering so far that this cartoon could be published in 1996:

  “I just did a huge one in my diaper.”

  It caused outrage among our readers, and made Shawn and Ross spin so rapidly in their graves that the whirring sound was audible even high atop The New Yorker offices in Manhattan.

  When David took over, in 1998, he pushed the pendulum back—not all the way to Shawn’s era but out of Tina Territory. It didn’t happen immediately. We needed a while to shake off Tina’s inclination to shock, and we published this cartoon in 1999, which is funny but, as I think David would agree now, not New Yorker funny:

  “Does this make me your bitch?”

  Why? First, because it’s gross and The New Yorker isn’t. And second, because, for many socially aware, empathetic citizens who read The New Yorker, it trivializes the problem of prison rape by making it the subject for a joke, which if laughed at would compromise the laughers’ status as socially aware empathetic citizens.

  Don’t get me wrong: I think being socially aware and empathetic is a good thing. But sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.

  Our readers can sometimes be so sensitive and so empathetic that they completely misinterpret the meaning of a cartoon. This Barbara Smaller cartoon

  “We’ve found by applying just the tiniest bit of an electric shock, test scores have soared.”

  provoked such a response:

  I have been a reader of your magazine for years and no longer find the cartoons amusing. But do you really think the cartoon advocating cruelty to children is funny?? Shocking and sad.

  This entirely misses the point of the cartoon, which does not advocate shocking children but satirizes, by exaggeration, the cruelty of the current obsession schools have with test scores at the expense of the children’s education, and even the children themselves.

  An e-mail response to this seemingly completely innocuous cartoon by Chris Weyant shows how important context can be to our readers.

  “You may now start packing on the pounds.”

  Please try to use more sensitivity to placement of cartoons in your feature articles. In “A History of Violence” from July 23, 2012, I found it particularly disturbing in light of the terrible food shortages in the region to have the cartoon about packing on the pounds. Although it deserved a chuckle, in this context it did not.

  As these examples, rightly, wrongly, and sometimes ridiculously demonstrate, what’s funny is influenced by where it appears. What works in a context where violating taboos is not only expected but demanded, like The Rejection Collection (a book of cartoons rejected by The New Yorker),

  would be wrongety wrong wrong where the expectations and demands are very different.

  What David almost immediately understood, and made me quickly understand, is that New Yorker cartoons are not just themselves. They appear within serious articles, like the one above, about the financial crisis of 2008—which, now that I think of it, was caused by ass-heads, so maybe that cartoon would work there. But it really couldn’t, because one of the quirks of The New Yorker’s system is that we never, ever have a cartoon in an article that relates to that article. Besides, that cartoon would still be offensive—certainly to butt-brains.

  Still, in setting limits, David also realizes that there needs to be some limit on the limits. He knows we can’t stop publishing cartoons like this:

  because some butt-brain reacts like this:

  Another joke on old white males. Ha ha. The wit. It’s nice, I’m sure, to be young and rude but someday you’ll be old, unless you drop dead as I wish.

  Cordially, B.B.

  Or be so sensitive that we can’t make fun of our own liberal sensibilities.

  “Native Americans!”

  “I hate to admit it, but a man with a big carbon footprint makes me hot.”

  “It runs on its conventional gasoline-powered engine until it senses guilt, at which point it switches over to battery power.”


  “Something’s just not right—our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past thirty.”

  The fact that David willingly selects cartoons that satirize the pieties of the magazine’s readership, as well as the published opinions of its writership, is consistent with his own balanced sense of humor. Simply put, he can take a joke as well as make one. He’s quick with a zinger (I know; I have the zing marks to prove it) but doesn’t mind being zinged himself. This balanced sense of humor is reflected in cartoons that jab political foes and friends alike.

  “This is Lawrence—he does something with right-wing smearing.”