You may be familiar with the New Yorker cartoon whose caption provides the title for Bob Mankoff's memoir, How About Never? Is Never Good For You? Mankoff, the magazine's cartoon editor since 1997, delivers a witty and informative behind-the-scenes look at contemporary American media's most prominent home for great cartooning. Anyone who turns to the cartoons as soon as they get a new issue will devour this delightful book with relish.
Mankoff's current post didn't exactly fall into his lap. Though he completed most of the course work for a Ph.D. in experimental psychology, his lifelong dream was to join the stable of New Yorker cartoonists. It took him 2,000 submissions until he landed his first acceptance in 1977, and it was another three years before then-editor Lee Lorenz recognized the "original and distinctive style" in Mankoff's painstakingly stippled drawings and suggested he be offered a contract. (He's published 900 cartoons since that first.)
As entertaining as Mankoff's own story is, however, the real fun of this book lies in the way he lifts the curtain to reveal the inner workings of the process that winnows some 1,000 cartoons submitted each week down to the roughly 17 that appear in each issue. Getting a cartoon into the New Yorker "is the equivalent of getting signed by the Yankees as a baseball player," Mankoff claims proudly, in a chapter that deconstructs the Seinfeld episode in which Elaine is determined to "crack the code" of a fictional cartoon (one Mankoff later made the subject of a caption contest).
The contest, a regular presence since 2005 and one of the magazine's most popular features, is the subject of another chapter, with helpful tips for aspiring contestants: "verbalize, conceptualize, topicalize, socialize and fantasize." There have been more than two million entries since the competition went weekly; the late Roger Ebert submitted 107 entries before he finally won.
Mankoff observes that New Yorker cartoons specialize in "benign humor, intended to intrigue or amuse but not to offend." What's evident from his account is that he presides over a group of talented artists and humorists who have mastered the tricky art of amusing the magazine's readers week in and week out and, if Mankoff has anything to say about it, will do so for years to come. --Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: The cartoon editor of the New Yorker offers an entertaining behind-the-scenes look at one of the magazine's most popular and enduring features.