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...
...Mizrahi develop fragrances, undergarments or other successful accessories, from which designers usually reap the bulk of their profits. Most devastating was the failure of his lower-priced bridge line nine months ago, which, though youthful and vibrant, never caught on. As fashion industry analyst Mark Mankoff, a partner at Ernst & Young, puts it, "Mizrahi just didn't reach enough people. He was not broadly accepted as a brand and an image and a life-style...