How About Never--Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons
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2. CONCEPTUALIZE. Take a break from the word play to play with ideas, generating alternate scenarios to explain the image or what the conflict is. For this image, a pretty obvious one would be that these are not in fact a duck and a chicken but people in duck and chicken costumes. That idea could lead to these captions:
“This is fun, but we’re going to be late for the Halloween party.”
“This isn’t working for me. I’ll get my hen costume.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to have sex if we got out of these costumes?”
The conflict could involve sexual orientation:
“It’s not you—I’m gay.”
Or religion:
“Wait, are you kosher?”
Or politics:
“Yes! I don’t care what the Republicans think.”
This technique is harder to do than verbalization, but it has the advantage of avoiding the most obvious captions and also of waking Marc up.
3. TOPICALIZE. If possible, we like to pick at least one finalist whose caption relates to something in the news. When this contest came out, in June 2006, the deadly avian flu virus, also known as bird flu, was very much in the news and also in our contest entries.
“Not so fast. What kind of protection do you have against the bird flu?”
“Wait. We really should use protection. You know the dangers of bird flu.”
“Please wear a condom, I don’t want to get the bird flu.”
“Wait, before we go any further: You have been inoculated for bird flu, haven’t you?”
“I know this is awkward, but have you been tested for bird flu?”
“Sorry, but I can’t tonight—I think I’m coming down with the bird flu.”
“I’m sorry, but until you get the bird-flu blood test, this just can’t go any further.”
“I have to ask … have you been tested recently for bird flu?”
“Are you sure you’ve been tested for bird flu?”
“Have you been tested for bird flu?”
“Do you know your bird flu status?”
“Wait!!! When were you last tested for bird flu…”
“Are you using protection? I don’t want the bird flu.”
“I know you don’t have bird flu … but I still want you to use a condom.”
“Can we catch the bird flu from this?”
“Not tonight, I have bird flu.”
“You know, I’d love to kiss you, but with this bird flu thing…”
“Bird flu or not, let’s throw caution to the winds…”
“Wait! Are you sure you have been tested for the bird flu?”
“Not tonight … I have the bird flu.”
“Wait!… before this goes any further I need to know … have you had your bird flu vaccination yet?”
“Don’t kiss me, I have the bird flu.”
“Oh please, Featherly Father, don’t let him have the bird flu.”
“Um, have you been tested for bird flu?”
“I’m not sure this is the best thing to be doing during bird flu season.”
I wanted to pick something from this group, and if they were funnier, I would have.
4. SOCIALIZE. Try your captions out on your friends and see which get the best reaction. If you’ve got funny friends, this will help. Also, accept their help if they make suggestions that improve the captions. This is not cheating. It’s competing.
5. FANTASIZE. Imagine you have won the contest.
Also the lottery and a MacArthur genius grant. It won’t make any of these more likely to happen, but after all the hard work you’ll have put in, you deserve it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT
When Lee Lorenz, my predecessor, became cartoon editor in 1973 he inherited from his predecessor, Jim Geraghty, a great bunch of cartoonists. To name not a few, but by no means all: Whitney Darrow Jr., Charles Saxon, Charles Barsotti, Frank Modell, Donald Reilly, Dana Fradon, Bud Handelsman, Ed Fisher, George Booth, James Stevenson, George Price, Stan Hunt, Henry Martin, Barney Tobey, Warren Miller, Robert Weber, Sam Gross, William Hamilton, Ed Frascino, Ed Koren, and, of course, Charles Addams. By the time he retired as cartoon editor, in 1997, many of them were no longer cartooning or were being grilled by Saint Peter for all the cartoons they had done about him.
“Coming from you, that really means something.”
However, he didn’t leave me a decimated cartoon staff, because in the intervening years he’d added Arnie Levin, Bernie Schoenbaum, Jack Ziegler (1974), Gahan Wilson (1976), Leo Cullum and me (1977), Roz Chast, Michael Maslin, and Tom Cheney (1978), Mick Stevens (1979), Mike Twohy (1980), Peter Steiner (1982), Dick Cline (1983), John O’Brien (1987), Danny Shanahan (1988), Liza Donnelly, Victoria Roberts, and Glen Baxter (1989), Bruce Eric Kaplan (1991), Frank Cotham (1993), P. C. Vey (1993), and Barbara Smaller (1996).
So when I took over I had, what with Lee’s additions (including Lee himself) and the ones who were still active from Geraghty’s time, a full staff of veteran cartoonists. All of them had been cartooning for a number of years, and some for a number of decades.
They were professionals, the best in the business, capable of turning in between ten and fifteen cartoons a week, week after week, despite the necessity of having most of them rejected. Sometimes a cartoonist would go weeks or even months at a time, New Yorker contract notwithstanding, without selling. Regardless, no one said anything. It was truly a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy; you didn’t ask why you weren’t selling, and they wouldn’t tell you.
One time, the cartoonist Mick Stevens broke the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule and asked Lee Lorenz why he hadn’t sold in months. Lee’s answer was “It’s hard to sell to The New Yorker.” Peter Steiner, who created this classic cartoon, one of the most cited, reprinted, and well known in New Yorker cartoon history, tried for years to get a drawing into the magazine. At one point, he wrote a letter to Lee asking what was wrong with his cartoons. Lee sent a handwritten note saying Peter’s characters were too … but Peter couldn’t make out the last word. Years later, after finally breaking in, Peter found out that the word was “broad.”
“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
That was the omertà cartoon code of silence that the crowd I inherited bought into. I bought into it, too, because I had been part of that crowd for twenty years. Also, I knew there was an upside to all that rejection, whether you were just breaking in or already established. It kept pushing you to get better even after you had become good. Jack Ziegler, who to date has published more than fourteen hundred cartoons in the magazine and has done more than eighteen thousand, once told me he really didn’t feel he had the hang of it until he had finished about three thousand.
Veterans like Jack made my job very easy. They submitted good cartoons, from which I selected the best, and then at the weekly cartoon meeting with the editor (first Tina Brown, then David Remnick), the best of the best would be chosen to go into the magazine. I felt like I was at the controls of a very smoothly functioning machine for creating, selecting, and publishing cartoons. And, frankly, a machine that could pretty much run on automatic pilot with just a little monitoring and tweaking to keep it on course.
Which, at the time, I thought was a good thing because I had a whole other job—actually two whole other jobs: president of the Cartoon Bank and New Yorker cartoonist—to occupy and preoccupy me. So every afternoon when my cartoon-editing duties at The New Yorker were done,
It was both exhilarating and exhausting. But I had no reason to complain. Of course, that didn’t stop me. Does it stop anyone?
“Oh, can’t complain, but I do.”
And even if I had complained, no one would have taken me seriously, because on the face of it, any one of those jobs is a dream job.
In the beginning, I focused most of my energies on the Cartoon Bank. As a start-up business, it could not survive on autopilot. And frankly, at that point, while being cartoon editor of The Ne
w Yorker was the prestige cartoon job to end all prestige cartoon jobs, my ego was still mostly invested in being president of the Cartoon Bank. It was my baby, and if things went right, it would grow up to be a win-win for everyone. But as cartoonist David Sipress points out, that’s never assured.
“You say it’s a win-win, but what if you’re wrong-wrong and it all goes bad-bad?”
Long story short, it didn’t go bad-bad. It ended up being a good-good thing both for The New Yorker and for the cartoonists, who got, and get, significant supplementary income from it: in royalty payments when the cartoons are licensed for use in textbooks, newsletters, and PowerPoint presentations for business or are bought as framed prints by individuals.
But by devoting so much energy to the livelihoods of the present generation of cartoonists, I was neglecting future generations. This wonderful plane flying on autopilot needed some actual piloting or it was going to run out of fuel. Unless I shifted my course, all that would be left of the New Yorker cartoon tradition would be found in cartoon anthologies.
So, I would have to do what Lee had done and find some new cartoonists. One immediately came to mind, a man whose addition to the staff would be a win-win for everyone. That’s right, you got it: David Sipress, whose cartoon I just featured. He had been banging on The New Yorker’s Cartoon Department door for a long time but for some reason had never been able to get in. Even though the number of markets for cartoons had dwindled over the decades, there were some left and David had been successful in those. And he had been an early member of the Cartoon Bank, before The New Yorker acquired it. With David, all I had to do was open the door, and a fully formed cartoonist came barging through. David has become the go-to guy for what we call our A-issue cartoons—cartoons that will appear in the next issue. And his gift for being topically on target made him our first choice when we launched our web-only Daily Cartoon feature.
Another established talent immediately available was Bill Haefeli, who had done cartoons for the venerable Punch magazine, in England. He was also an early member of the Cartoon Bank, so I was familiar with and an admirer of his work. He entered The New Yorker with this cartoon, in 1998:
“Teri tells me you’re ostensibly straight.”
Bill says that when he was growing up, he never thought being gay would be a professional asset, but once homosexuality and the issues surrounding it became an irrefutable part of the cultural landscape, he didn’t have to look far afield for material.
“I have two children from a previous sexuality.”
“I have two mommies. I know where the apostrophe goes.”
And it goes without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that Bill can turn his gimlet eye and pen on the straight world
“Perhaps your performance anxiety wouldn’t be so bad if you performed better.”
and the rest of the cultural landscape as well.
“I’m cutting articles out of the newspaper while we still can.”
A few other established talents came in at about the same time. J. C. Duffy, from the comic-strip world,
“Stella!”
Chris Weyant, from editorial cartooning,
“Susan, this might be just the wine talking, but I think I want to order more wine.”
and Harry Bliss, who was already a cover artist for The New Yorker.
“Artie, they took my bowl.”
In 2002, this group was joined by Drew Dernavich. Drew had a fine arts background in printmaking but preferred to work in humor, drawing political cartoons for a variety of weekly newspapers in Boston. After years of trying out different styles and cartoon formats, he finally settled on a woodcut-like style, but the editors for whom he had previously worked told him, “These are not cartoons.” What can I say? Boston weekly editorial cartooning’s loss was mine and The New Yorker’s gain.
“Now is the part of the show when we ask the audience to shout out some random numbers.”
“The Court will allow the cape but will draw the line at the wind machine.”
Unfortunately, I soon realized that cherry-picking talent wasn’t going to be sufficient, because there just weren’t enough cherries out there.
The New Yorker was still standing tall, however: a cartoon edifice among the rubble of former cartoon markets, a beacon to those who dreamed my dream, of cartooning where Addams, Arno, and Thurber had, and now Chast, Ziegler, Cullum, Kaplan, and others did.
To quote Alex Gregory, who has since become one of our stars:
For the record, I never wanted to become a cartoonist. I still don’t. I have only wanted to draw cartoons for The New Yorker. For the life of me, I can’t remember when I realized I wanted to become a New Yorker cartoonist or why, really. I just know that while the other boys my age in New Jersey were stealing mopeds and shooting each other with BB guns in the woods, I spent way too much time in libraries poring over New Yorker anthologies and how-to-cartoon books.
But for Alex and others to get a foot in the door, I needed to open the door a bit wider. That’s why in 1998 I established Open-Call Tuesdays, where anyone who wanted to show me cartoons could make an appointment to see me. Previously, that privilege had been restricted to established New Yorker cartoonists. In fact, it took me a whole year of being published before I was invited to show my cartoons in person.
I thought Open-Call Tuesdays was a great idea, that in and of itself it would bring a bunch of new cartoonists to the magazine. And a lot of fresh-faced aspirants did show up.
But I was still asking them to suck it up, like I had, and take rejection week in and week out. Not only accept it but embrace it. I told them it would make them better cartoonists and better people. Look how much better it made me.
Unhappily, my rejection-to-redemption story did not inspire them; it scared many of them off. They were disappearing into the wilds of advertising, illustration, animation, and sitcom writing, because the other major magazines that previously used cartoons had mostly disappeared, and all I was handing out, besides good wishes, were rejections.
If aspiring cartoonists were not selling here, they were not selling anywhere. This was not a reinforcement schedule that was going to produce persistence. It’s as if in baseball the minor leagues had been eliminated and you had to make the New York Yankees right out of high school.
If New Yorker cartoons weren’t going to become museum pieces, we were going to have to be the minor leagues as well as the majors. We were going to have to break with tradition, in order for the tradition of cartoons in The New Yorker to continue. Honestly, I wasn’t all that happy about this. Why shouldn’t the new generation have the privilege of covering their bathroom walls with rejection slips? It wasn’t just that I wanted younger cartoonists to suffer as I had; I understood that you learn more from your failures than your successes. But I realized that if all you ended up having were failures, all you would have learned is how to fail.
So I broke the code of silence and became a real blabbermouth, giving aspiring cartoonists feedback and developing a mini course in cartoon fundamentals and the psychology of humor.
For instance, the punch line comes at the end of the joke, and when it ends, the joke should, too. Like this,
“There you have it, gentlemen—the upside potential is tremendous, but the downside risk is jail.”
not this:
“There you have it, gentlemen—the downside risk is jail, but the upside potential is tremendous.”
And yes, things are funnier in threes because you need a sequence of at least two to create the right surprise. Without surprise, there is no joke. Surprise requires a setup sequence to work most effectively. Usually what’s called a “triplet” is involved, with two items leading to a third, which functions as the punch line.
I explained to my quasi students that if I had just a door in an office setting with “Jail” on it, there would not be the tension that can be released by the “punch.”
This “triplet” structure applied to captions, as well.
Over time, the mini course became somewhat major, dealing with all the technicalities of the craft as applied to both ideas and graphics.
But if I had to wait for new cartoonists to assimilate all the rules and produce perfect cartoons before they could get into the magazine, I would be waiting a very long time. And time wasn’t on my side.
In the past, “close” had always meant “close but no cigar”—in other words, not quite good enough to win the prize of getting into The New Yorker. However, now close could be good enough to get published. The truth is, we (I couldn’t have done this without David Remnick’s full support) were cutting new cartoonists some slack, doing some affirmative action, giving them some reinforcements to get them hooked on cartooning the way I had been.
Two early examples of this were Matt Diffee and Alex Greogry. Matt came to my attention in 1998 because he had won an early version of the cartoon caption contest that had been sponsored by The New Yorker’s business department. Raised as a religious fundamentalist, Matt had graduated from Bob Jones University. However, he’d majored not in fundamentalism but art. He’d also headed a comedy team called the Leaping Pickles, which, he wryly remarks, put the “fun” in fundamentalism. So Matt could draw and he was funny—good qualities in a potential cartoonist.