Word: mankoff
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...There's a bedrock core of humanity. We have the same pompousness that needs to be punctured," says Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of the New Yorker and creator of the iconic cartoon in which a man is looking at his calendar while on the phone saying, "No, Thursday's out. How about never--is never good for you?" Mankoff spent two years collecting every cartoon ever printed in the magazine, which meant rounding up old issues from storage facilities in Queens and Illinois. "I'm offering $10 for any cartoon we missed, $20 if you just shut up about...
...Mankoff, however, discovered that not even an oversize, 10-lb. book is big enough to hold all 68,647 cartoons. So he picked the best 2,004 and put the rest on two CDs that come with the book. What he wound up with is not only a stand-up routine for smart people who own a coffee table but a history of American culture. You can see how confused and fascinated New Yorkers were by skyscrapers in the 1930s, how threatened and angered men were by workingwomen after World War II and how uncomfortable Americans were with the growing...
...book is even more interesting as an archive of American humor. From the '30s until the '80s, Mankoff says, the punch line was in the third person: we were laughing at--not with--the figure in the cartoon: it was an era of screwball comedies, Jack Benny and cops chasing people through hallway doors. In a James Thurber cartoon, a man stops his date in the lobby of his building to say, "You wait here and I'll bring the etchings down." It's the Joey theory of humor...
...early '80s, Chandler had taken over, and the speaker was in on the joke. "Now everyone does shtick, so you see this wiseguy attitude. They're giving you their philosophy through humor," says Mankoff. In a 2002 cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan, who wrote for Seinfeld, a wife exiting a movie theater says to her husband, "I liked it except for you." Says Mankoff: "It's a Seinfeld line. That person realizes she is funny." Jokes today are also less visual and far more newsy than they were 40 years ago, when cartoonists could not expect news events to enter...
...real proof that humor is immutable isn't that you still shamefully laugh at a 1972 cartoon in which a Chinese warrior says, "That banquet was most delicious, and yet now, somehow, once again I feel the pang of hunger." It's that every week Mankoff has to reject great submissions because the research department sends him typed index cards enumerating similar jokes made in New Yorker cartoons over the past 79 years. Seriously, people, let go of the deserted island...