Why Are New Yorker Cartoons Not Funny

In his new book, How About Never – Is Never Good For You? My Life in Cartoons, Bob Mankoff cites E.B. White, the celebrated essayist and children's novelist, who once warned, "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

But Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker, also notes that Max Eastman, in his 1936 book, Enjoyment of Laughter, "completely ignored White's advice. Eastman's basic point was that humor is a kind of play, and that if you don't understand that and accept it, you won't enjoy humor."

In a playful kind of way, USA TODAY asked Mankoff, who calls himself a "humorologist," to dissect five cartoons from his new book — two by him and three by others.

Surely you jest

Mankoff's drawing of a forgetful court jester was published in The Saturday Review in 1975, after it (along with more than 500 of his early cartoons) was rejected by The New Yorker.

Mankoff notes his pointillist style, using dots to create images. That's a technique known to illustrators as "stippling," which, he says, "sounds sort of like a dermatological disease."

He says this cartoon uses "one of the classic things you use in jokes: an anachronism. When the jester says he's remembered the punch line, he's using a word — punch line — that didn't exist until vaudeville or the early 20^th century."

As with most jokes, Mankoff adds, "it's about something bad." He cites a theory of humor called "benign violation," and says, "We shouldn't think bad things are good things, but we're laughing at this jester essentially being tortured. Why? Because he's not being tortured. It's make-believe. In the fantasy world of humor, we laugh at things that in the real world would be unpleasant."

Mankoff sees humor as "a coping mechanism," which helps explain why many New Yorker cartoons are "about the grim reaper or illness or marriages gone terribly bad. There are no cartoons about marriages gone terribly good."

One-two punch line

Mankoff wasn't at Woodstock in 1969 (at the time he was a social worker and a graduate student in experimental psychology) but says that by 1979, when this cartoon appeared in The New Yorker, "93% of the population claimed they were at Woodstock."

Even if he missed all three days of peace and love, he says, "I was counter-cultural, with the hair and the attitude and all of that." But a decade later, he imagined a Woodstock reunion where everyone is dressed up. "They've become yuppies."

The cartoon is a "mash-up. The first element is surprise. In humor, you need surprise or it's not going to be funny. You also have some sarcasm here. When you look at these people, we're making fun of them."

For the joke to work, "it has to happen in half-a-second." Usually, it's the caption that supplies the punch line. But in this case, no caption is needed. "The title above (Woodstock Reunion) is the set-up. We don't know what this picture is about until we see the title. It's kind of like a one-two punch."

Gallows humor

Roz Chast's 1993 cartoon is an "example of identification humor."

Mankoff says, "We understand there's truth here" in a man reading an obituary page with headlines that read: "Two years younger than you," "Exactly your age" and "Five years your senior."

"When we read the obituary page and see someone our age, it sends a shiver through us," Mankoff says. "So, it's sarcasm about our own narcissism."

The New Yorker's cartoons often mock "our foibles and weaknesses. They're not for things that deserve imprisonment. They're not a counter-force against criminality. They are a slight corrective against our weaknesses. The cartoons often mock the very class that's reading them."

And as for younger readers who might miss Chast's joke, Mankoff says, "If they don't get it, I say, 'Give it time.' "

Stereotypes for laughs

New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan, who signs his cartoons BEK, is famous in some circles for writing the 1998 episode of Seinfeld that revolved around an imaginary New Yorker cartoon that Elaine couldn't understand.

In his stark style, Kaplan pokes fun at a man's failure to communicate with a woman. Or, as Mankoff describes it, "another cartoon with truth in it that thrives on conflict."

"The man in the cartoon is not caring in the way the woman in the cartoon wants him to care. He's in a position of so many men — trying to figure out what's going on in a woman's mind. …He's doing the best he can, but failing horribly."

The caption is complicated: "You almost can't follow its twists and turns, but as a metaphor, it shows the twists and turns that the man is going through."

And yes, it's based on a stereotypes, "but all humor is based on stereotypes," Mankoff says. "In this case, men are unfeeling oafs and women are overly complicated in their thought processes. But what's really nice is that the caption itself parallels the whole idea behind the cartoon."

Element of surprise

Mankoff calls Alex Gregory's 2003 cartoon mocking vegetarians a "perfect triple."

"It delivers a surprise with two things followed by a contradiction: The first two things are good reasons (to be a vegetarian): health and moral choice – and then comes the surprise, when she says, 'just to annoy people.' "

Mankoff says, "It wouldn't work if the woman in the cartoon had first said, 'I'm a vegetarian to annoy people.' If the punch line came at the beginning, there would be no misdirection."

He cites the reason the joke works: "Vegetarianism may stand in for everyone's dietary obsessions and concerns. To have a Thanksgiving dinner that satisfies everyone now, you might have to prepare 13 meals."

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Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2014/03/24/how-about-never-bob-mankoff/6643541/

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