And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft

by Mike Sacks

  What did Manhattan represent to you, as someone who grew up right across the East River?

  Speaking of parallel universes! It was a different world for me, and it was magical. When I was young, I attended weekend art classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan, and I really liked it. As I got older — after I moved to the city — I loved it even more.

  As for my career goals, I never, ever thought that I would one day be published in The New Yorker. I was hoping that maybe, fingers crossed, I might one day have a strip in The Village Voice, because that's where Jules Feiffer and Stan Mack were published. When I first began to sell my cartoons in the late seventies, I was mostly dropping them off at The Village Voice and National Lampoon.

  What was the magazine-cartoon market like in the late seventies?

  There were very few outlets. The “golden age of cartooning,” as the cartoonist Sam Gross used to call it, was over by this point. It used to be that all of the male cartoonists — and they were pretty much all male — would put their work into a portfolio each week. First, they'd go to The New Yorker, because that was the top of the heap. Whatever cartoons weren't bought would be taken to the editors of the next tier, like The Saturday Evening Post or Ladies' Home Journal or McCall's. They would make the rounds and work their way down the list, to the very bottom — maybe eventually even to [pornographic men's magazine] Gent.

  That process was already over when I started to pitch my cartoons to magazines in the late seventies. For one thing, there were so few magazines publishing cartoons. It was much more difficult to place them. It was pretty much down to The New Yorker and National Lampoon. There was Playboy, but that wasn't on my list.

  Did you always write your own cartoons? Or did you have outside gag writers help you?

  No, I always wrote my own. Gag writers were more common in the past. The tradition of the gag writer selling cartoon ideas to an artist had begun to end in the sixties. I didn't even know there was such a thing as gag writers until I became a cartoonist. A lot of famous cartoonists used them, like Peter Arno, George Price … even Charles Addams would sometimes buy gags — which really freaked me out.

  When I first started, for maybe the first seven or eight years, I would receive packets from gag writers. And that was very weird. The envelopes would arrive, and I'd just go, Arrrghhhhh!

  I knew that these people were going through a list of cartoonists' names, and mine was on there somewhere. The gags were always very traditional and mostly pretty lame: “Two guys standing in a bar talking,” and then there'd be a corny punchline you'd read eighty times before. It was obvious they'd never seen a single cartoon of mine.

  Who were these gag writers? Were they doing it for fun, or did they actually make a living at it?

  I have no idea. I don't think they were young people, because I can't imagine a young person doing such a thing. I always imagined them as middle-aged men living alone in small apartments, above stores on main streets in sad, grim towns. Even the envelopes the gags came in were sad — all crumply and yellowed and hand-addressed in a saddish way.

  How old were you when you sold your first cartoon to The New Yorker?

  I was twenty-three. I went under contract at the end of that first year. I think a lot of it had to do with my being in the right place at the right time. Maybe the magazine wanted to attract younger readers. Lee Lorenz was the art editor at the time. I will always be grateful to him.

  Did you feel that The New Yorker wanted to include underground cartoonists and their sensibility in the magazine?

  No, not underground, exactly. I didn't have that sense at that time at all. I think they just wanted to open it up a little to maybe a “younger sensibility.”

  Do you feel that it helped that you were a female cartoonist? There weren't many at The New Yorker at the time.

  I'm pretty sure it wasn't only because I was female. I signed my cartoons “R.” They didn't know what I was.

  I think there was only one other female New Yorker cartoonist in the late seventies, although there'd been more in the past, like Helen Hokinson, Mary Petty, Barbara Shermund, and others. Now there are about five. I didn't think much about the “female” thing.

  How much were you paid for your first New Yorker cartoon?

  $250.

  How much are you paid today for a New Yorker cartoon?

  $1,300.

  What was the reaction to your first one? Even looking at it today, I find it to be very odd and different. It's called “Little Things,” and it features bizarre shapes with funny names: “chent,” “spak,” “kabe,” “tiv,” etc. There's no gag — at least in the traditional sense.

  I think a lot of readers were pretty perturbed. Some of the older New Yorker cartoonists were really bothered by that cartoon, too. It's strange that Lee chose that one. I had submitted fifty or sixty, and this was the weirdest in the batch. It was so rough and personal, and it was so weird.

  [Laughs] Later, Lee told me that somebody had asked him whether he owed my family any money.

  It was certainly a break from the type of New Yorker cartoon that came before.

  I knew that my cartoons were quite different, which is why I never really thought they would appear in The New Yorker. I never deliberately set out to be different; that's just how I draw. But if I tried to conform to somebody else's idea of what's funny, I'd have no compass at all. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

  Has The New Yorker's submission process changed for you since you first began?

  No, it hasn't changed much at all. I've submitted, let's see: thirty years times forty-six weeks on average a year … whatever that is, since I first started, and I still do it basically the same way: Each week I submit between five and ten cartoons. Usually, about six or seven.

  And how many, on average, will be accepted each week?

  It's really hard to say. I might average one per issue for maybe three or four weeks in a row, but then I might go for three or four weeks and not sell any. And then the next week, for no reason at all, it seems, they'll buy two.

  Someone once told me about a psychological experiment that was done with rats: if you keep rewarding the rats with a pellet each time they push a lever, they will eventually become bored and stop pushing the lever. And if they receive no pellets at all, they'll get discouraged and stop pushing the lever. But if you provide them with intermittent, random pellets, they just keep pushing that lever. Sometimes I feel like I am that rat.

  It's a tough business. You only feel as good as your last sale. Even this many years later, I still get depressed if I haven't made a sale for a couple of weeks. I always feel like that's the end of it, you know — I really have run out of ideas!

  You would think that by now I would understand that when I get depressed, it's part of the cycle. But it's still hard. The fact is, there are no guarantees. I don't know too many cartoonists who are super-confident people.

  Do you hand-deliver these cartoons to the New Yorker office?

  I used to go every week, but it just took too much time. In the eighties, I'd have a weekly lunch with the rest of the New Yorker cartoonists. But when we all moved out of the city, the group disbanded. I feel I can better use my time to stay at home and work. Or procrastinate.

  Anyway, once a week, I fax a batch of rough sketches to The New Yorker offices. I try to draw pretty much what the finished cartoon will look like. You know, if people are standing in a room, I'll sketch the room, but I won't put in all of the fine detail until the cartoon is bought. The initial versions are always rough. If they buy it, I do a “finish” — a finished version of the sketch.

  How long does a finish take?

  For a very simple drawing, it might take an hour and a half. For a more complicated one, especially those in color, it might take several hours.

  What exactly goes on in a New Yorker cartoon meeting? To me — and, I think, to many others — The New Yorker is almost like the Kremlin. It's a world of mystery, smoke, and mirrors.r />
  I've never been to a New Yorker art meeting where the editors talked about cartoons. It'd be like peeking in on your parents and accidentally seeing them doing things you know they do, but don't want to think about them doing.

  I once read an article that described the process, but I've since repressed it. As much as I would like to imagine the editors saying, “This one is really good, but this one is even better!,” I know the disgusting, painful reality.

  Do a lot of these ideas for cartoons gestate for a long time before you sketch them?

  Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Often, ideas will crop up when I'm in my studio just doodling and thinking. I remember when I was drawing “The Fantastic Voyage” [Scientific American, July 2002]. I had been thinking about the cliché of spaceships and strange submarine-like vehicles that would travel through the body in sci-fi films from the fifties and sixties. I wondered, What if people were in a broken-down bus instead? Or in the family sedan? That's how that cartoon came about.

  I once doodled a crazy man holding a sign that read: The End is Near! I just felt like drawing one of these guys — who knows why. After looking at the guy for a while, I realized that he needed a crazy wife. So I drew him a wife, and she was holding up a sign that said: You wish. That one came out of the blue.

  What ideas are you currently mulling over?

  I'm working on an idea now. I wrote down, “Break Internet.” I like the thought of breaking the Internet, as if it were a toy or an appliance. Now that I describe it, it sounds pretty lame. [The cartoon was not bought.]

  How extensive is your backlog of unsold cartoons?

  Thousands and thousands. It's an ocean of rejection. A lot of them are very dated, and a lot of them are just plain bad, but in that pile I will sometimes find something I want to rework. I have so many rejected drawings that it almost becomes raw material for me. When I'm stuck, I sometimes go into that file, and I'll see if there's an idea hiding that can be fixed.

  How much time do you spend on the exact wording of your cartoons?

  It really depends. Sometimes a cartoon will be very clear in my head from the minute I conceptualize it. Other times — especially with a multi-panel “story” cartoon — it takes longer. I like the editing process. I think — I hope — that this is something I've gotten better at as I've gotten older. I probably could have done more self-editing when I was younger.

  Specifically, what sort of self-editing?

  Eliminating things I don't need; paying attention to the rhythm of a joke. I don't want to make anyone read more than absolutely necessary.

  I wonder how many readers even notice how finely structured the wording is in certain cartoons — such as with your work, or Garry Trudeau's “Doones-bury,” or Gary Larson's “The Far Side.” There's never an extra comma or beat.

  Bad rhythm is something you see frequently with amateur cartoonists. With that said, there are times when I can feel the rhythm of a cartoon more clearly than at other times. I work on deadline, and I have to do this whether I'm in the mood to work or not. But why I'm in the mood sometimes and not at other times is still a mystery.

  Do you have tricks you've taught yourself that have made the process less difficult?

  Getting away from work and coming back to it fresh really helps. Also, Truman Capote once said that if you have to leave a manuscript or a chapter, don't finish up the last little bit, because then, when you come back, you'll have to re-start from nothing. I've often used this approach. If I'm going downstairs for lunch, I leave something I'm excited to come back to — so I won't be starting from zero miles per hour. But it doesn't always work.

  Do you consider yourself as much a writer as a cartoonist?

  I don't consider myself as much of a writer as a “real” writer — those writers who write without drawings. And I don't consider myself as much of an artist as a “real” artist — somebody who paints without using any words. But cartooning is a hybrid, and cartoonists are hybrids. We feel incomplete doing just one or the other. When I have to write and I can't use pictures, it's very frustrating.

  So where do you see the art of cartooning in the future? Do you think it'll remain a viable profession?

  I don't know how viable it is now. It's a very tough profession. I really don't know whether cartooning for magazines will stick around. There's a lot written about teenagers and print media and how irrelevant the non-electronic media might soon become. I really don't know what's going to happen. But I do know that if someone wants to become a cartoonist, they're going to find an outlet.

  I'd like to learn more about animation programs. If there were a computer program that wasn't too difficult to learn, I might just give it a shot. Hopefully you can always learn something new — always, always, always. Key word: “hopefully.”

  Any advice for cartoonists starting out with their careers?

  I'm really grateful for the life-drawing classes I took at art school. Not that anyone looking at my characters would believe it, but I think life-drawing is really important. A cartoonist has to know how a body sits or stands on a page. It's like learning a language.

  I feel that on my deathbed, which is something I hope to eventually have, I'll probably look back and wish that I didn't always look on the dark side of everything. But how can you not? You could die at any time, for any reason. You're walking under an air conditioner, and kaboom! My parents actually know someone who was killed by a falling flower pot. But we have to kind of go along and put one foot in front of the other and pretend that we don't know that everything could take a serious turn for the worse in the next second.

  It's all in the pretending.

  Yes, it's all in the pretending. Any of us could walk outside right now and Mr. Anvil could suddenly meet Mr. Top of Head. But we pretend otherwise.

  Actually, that'd make for a nice cartoon.

  And if I'm safely off to the side while it happens to you, and if there's a deadline looming, I would absolutely love to draw it. [Laughs]

  Quick and Painless Advice for the Aspiring Humor Writer, part eight

  GETTING A BOOK OF HUMOR PUBLISHED

  Advice from Book Editors at HarperCollins, Random House, and Patrick Price at Simon Spotlight Entertainment

  You can pitch your idea to a publisher on your own, but it helps significantly if you have an agent.

  It's very hard to place humor that's just humor. The humor books I've had better luck with have had some sort of prescriptive ‘useful’ element. In other words, they have a common theme.

  Keep in mind that the book-publishing business works slowly — it can take three years from the time you pitch an idea to the book's publication. Do not pitch ideas that will become dated too quickly.

  The selection and evaluation process in this business is highly subjective to begin with, and I can think of no more subjective subject than humor. With that in mind, if your material hasn't been published in a magazine publication, test-market the work among friends to get an accurate read on whether it is — in fact — funny.

  Do not compare yourself to David Sedaris. Every book editor has heard that so many times that it's seen — at best — as white noise. If you write hysterical, idiosyncratic essays, we'll make the obvious comparison in your future marketing copy.

  If you're writing a proposal, ask yourself repeatedly if there is, in fact, a book's worth of material in the idea. Many humor proposals I receive can't stay funny and fresh for the length of the proposal — how then will the author be able to squeeze out two hundred to three hundred pages? I would say most of the humor proposals I receive are really magazine pieces in disguise.

  Do not write in your cover letter, “Perfect for being placed next to the cash register.”

  Do not suggest your book as the first of a series. Things like this — and delivering the proposal with a book cover already designed — make it appear that you're more interested in the idea of being published than in actually writing a good book.

  No wacky packaging o
r raw materials.

  Edit yourself. What's clever in ten words can rapidly become tedious in over fifty. Sometimes understated and dry is far better than aiming to impress with literary grandstanding. An editor will happily ask for more, but will usually be turned off if reaching the humor's heart requires an archaeological dig.

  Only the most brilliant of parodies works — and often even they have short shelf lives.

  It all boils down to ‘the voice.’ If you be yourself, it should prove unique. That is half the battle toward being funny and getting published.

  Daniel Handler

  INTERVIEW BONUS

  Daniel Handler has never been shy about fleshing out the vague and cryptic details of his alter ego, Lemony Snicket, the “author” of the 13-part series, A Series of Unfortunate Events. As for Handler's own backstory, information has been less forthcoming. Born in 1970 and raised in San Francisco, he once claimed that his mother, Sandra Handler Day, was an opera singer who met his father after an opera performance. As it turns out, this oft repeated personal detail was only a joke. They did meet at an opera, but only as fans. His mother was a dean of City College of San Francisco, and his father was an accountant.

  First published in 1999, with the volume A Bad Beginning, and having since sold more than fifty million copies internationally, A Series of Unfortunate Events has been translated into more than forty different languages and has even been adapted into a major Hollywood feature film (in 2004), with Jim Carrey playing the coveted character of Count Olaf.

  If you believe that the real test of literature's longevity is whether it's hated as much as it's beloved, especially if it's geared toward children, Handler's books should be around for a long time. The books have been banned by at least one school in southeast Texas, as well as in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, primarily because the principal felt the books endorsed “incest.” More likely, the principal failed to grasp the nuances of the exceptionally dark humor that so easily appealed to his young students.