I Only Read It for the Cartoons: The New Yorker’s Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists

215 Pages·2014·9.3 MB·English

by  Richard Gehr

Text copyright © 2014 by Richard Gehr All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Amazon Publishing, New York www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo and Amazon Publishing are trademarks of
Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.
ISBN-10: 1477801154
ISBN-13: 9781477801154
Cover design by Lynn Buckley
Author photograph © Violet Gehr
For my parents
Contents Foreword
Introduction
1 The Editor with a Horn: Lee Lorenz
2 Sex, Death, and Frogs’ Legs: Sam Gross
3 The Exurban Everymom: Roz Chast
4 King of the Scrapyard: George Booth
5 The Beastly Beatitudes of Edward Koren
6 The Kansas City Curmudgeon: Charles Barsotti
7 The Beatnik Biker: Arnie Levin
8 The Coupled Cosmos of Victoria Roberts
9 Auteur d’Horreur: Gahan Wilson
10 The Belated Middle American: Jack Ziegler
11 Neckless: The Short, Sharp World of Zachary Kanin
12 The Doctor of Dots: Robert Mankoff
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Illustration Credits
Foreword
View of The New Yorker from Portland, Oregon
I
FELL IN LOVE with New Yorker cartoons before I could read. I remember
being four years old, crawling on the carpet through the hovering living-
room dust motes to the bookshelf behind my cartoonist dad’s easy chair. There a
treasure trove of oversized hardback anthologies of magazine cartoons was kept
conveniently on the bottom shelf, easy for me to grab and scribble in. With a
mix of awe and bafflement, I pored through “The New Yorker” 1950–1955
Album; “The New Yorker” Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Album, 1925–1950; Helen
E. Hokinson’s The Ladies, God Bless ’Em!; James Thurber’s Fables for Our
Time and The Thurber Carnival; Charles Addams’s Monster Rally, Addams and
Evil, and Homebodies; Syd Hoff’s “Oops! Wrong Party!”; and Peter Arno’s
Sizzling Platter, Hell of a Way to Run a Railroad, and Man in the Shower. Man
in the Shower’s cover particularly unnerved me—that’s the one with the hapless
underwater naked guy gesticulating to his wife to open the shower door.
Throughout my childhood I returned to those cartoon books (along with
memorable collections by Punch magazine contributors Ronald Searle and
Rowland Emett), but learning to read the captions only wised me up slightly to
the real meanings of these strange and beautiful and sometimes sexy drawings.
In fourth grade my precocious pal Duncan Smith clued me in to the genius of
Saul Steinberg, and we would sit in the adult art-book room at the Multnomah
County Library in downtown Portland, Oregon, trying to copy Steinberg from
his books The Passport and The Labyrinth. (Duncan’s illustrations were great—I
couldn’t draw a straight line.) I also spent countless hours in the basement at
home among the piles of New Yorkers, never bothering with the long columns of
snoozy print, only reading it for the cartoons. It wasn’t until high school and
college that I started digging the non-cartoon content, but the New Yorker thing I
still remember most from those years is Steinberg’s 1976 cover “View of the
World from 9th Avenue.”
My grown-up love of New Yorker cartoons continues unabated. New
Yorker cartoonists have always been fascinating creatures, toiling away in
solitude and self-effacing about their subtle brilliance. I think I understand most
of their cartoons these days, although I admit a few still bewilder me, which is
enjoyable in its own perverse way. (That Ed Koren cartoon with the crashed car
—“It’s a narrative I didn’t intend”—remains a stumper.) In 2004 I bought The
Complete Cartoons of “The New Yorker” (“includes two CDs with all 68,647
cartoons ever published in the magazine”), but the CDs were kind of balky. A
couple of years later I got the eight-DVD Complete “New Yorker,” which
proved even more annoying than the CDs; so I coughed up three hundred bucks
for The Complete “New Yorker” Portable Hard Drive, which kind of worked
until I lost it in a drawer someplace. And now here we are in the spectacular
future and the whole New Yorker archive is online for subscribers . . . hooray!
My longtime friend and Boy Scout troop mate Richard Gehr has done a
terrific job with the profiles in this book. He is possibly even more besotted with
New Yorker cartoon mania than me, if the issues he packed on camping trips are
any indication. His knowledge of the history and culture of the magazine and his
incisive, revealing interviews make for great reading, and you can tell the
cartoonists are tickled by his informed questions. New Yorker cartoonists, like
almost all less exalted cartoonists, are a pretty unpresuming lot, but, man, are
they quirky, sly, and funny. When Roz Chast, George Booth, Ed Koren, and all
the rest read this book, I think they will be delighted—as will you.
— MATT GROENING
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA
JANUARY 2014
Introduction
How to Read a New Yorker Cartoon
I
F YOU THINK entering The New Yorker’s weekly Caption Contest is a
hoot, try competing with a roomful of cartoon fans and an open bar. A live
version of the Cartoon Caption Contest is among the more popular events of the
annual New Yorker Festival, and in 2012 I found myself sitting at one of several
tables in Condé Nast Publications’ executive dining room, where participants
enjoyed executive snacks and the opportunity to have their captions judged by
the pros: George Booth, Harry Bliss, Kim Warp, and New Yorker editor-
cartoonist Robert Mankoff. The tables competed against one another for copies
of the recently published The Big “New Yorker” Book of Dogs. Not
coincidentally, all three of the captionless images we were required to enhumor
also involved canine situations. A captioning newbie, I quickly got the hang of
this kartoon karaoke and was soon amusing myself, if no one else. (The one
about Laika and the dating service was especially killer.) What is wrong with
these people? I thought, as lesser efforts were rewarded.
The Caption Contest is an immensely popular feature. Some five thousand
entries a week suggest that a good portion of the magazine’s readers imagine
that they could step up to the plate and knock gags out of the park with these
Yankees of Yucks. But, of course, that’s only half the battle, insofar as relatively
few of us can draw as well as quip. For much of the magazine’s run, outside
writers supplied artists with their material. Today, however, drawing a New
Yorker cartoon is rarely a two-person proposition.
In reality, cartooning for The New Yorker is mostly an exercise in rejection.
Cartoon editor Mankoff and editor in chief David Remnick nix hundreds of
cartoons for every one they publish in the magazine. One regular contributor,
Matthew Diffee, has taken the iniquity in hand by publishing a series of
Rejection Collection volumes devoted to “Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never
Will See, in The New Yorker.” And when I asked staff writer Calvin Trillin for
his thoughts on the state of New Yorker cartooning, he prefaced his response by
saying it would be prejudiced by the fact that not a single one of his many
cartoon ideas had ever made it into the magazine.
Two days after the festival, I was in Lawrence, Kansas, recounting my
afternoon of shame to Jack Ziegler, one of The New Yorker’s more inventive and
frequently appearing cartoonists. I suppose I expected a little sympathy. Instead,
Ziegler went about as straight-faced as I’d seen him get all afternoon.
“Now you know how I feel,” he said.
But there’s a lot more to a New Yorker cartoon than a clever caption, and it
takes an artist like Ziegler to complete the equation. Like a pop single, every
cartoon creates its own little universe in which you can linger. In fact, says
single-panel virtuoso Dan Piraro, whose Bizarro comic appears in some 350
outlets daily, a cartoon is the only way certain ideas can be expressed. “You see
a small slice of time, and a few words, and your mind must put together what has
just happened to lead to this, or what is about to happen moments later. If you
take almost any given single-panel gag and spell it out long form, be it a comic
strip or actors fleshing out the scene on video, the joke is completely ruined.”
Ivan Brunetti, a cartoonist and a comics scholar to boot, insists that
“whether it’s minimal or dense with detail, a cartoon instantly puts you
somewhere, and you’re picking up so much narrative without even realizing it.
You’re entering a world the cartoonist creates.” A cartoon is a collaboration
between artist and reader and a tiny vacation from sad, boring reality.
The timing of the first New Yorker cartoons couldn’t have been better in
this respect. The Roaring Twenties were about to give way to the Great
Depression. In the magazine’s first issue—dated February 21, 1925—founding
editor Harold Ross wrote, “The New Yorker starts with a declaration of serious
purpose but with a concomitant declaration that it will not be too serious in
executing it. It hopes to reflect metropolitan life, to keep up with events and
affairs of the day, to be gay, humorous, satirical but to be more than a jester.”
Little could Ross have imagined that he would be publishing an entire issue
devoted to John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” just twenty years later. Or, for that
matter, imagine Hersey marrying Charles Addams’s first wife, which he did.
The first New Yorker cartoon appeared on the same page as Ross’s credo.
In Alfred Frueh’s drawing, a disheveled subway rider wearing an overcoat and