An interview with David Remnick was posted on big think about humor and New Yorker cartoons. He is the senior editor of The New Yorker. Along with the cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, the two men choose the cartoons that the magazine buys. What he says is not new, that it is hard to make a living at being a magazine cartoonist, and that many of us do other things as well. We have to. I teach, do illustration, write books.
The question is, what does he mean when he says he is looking for humor that is “authentically funny”? What is “humor at the highest level”? There is no universal standard, as there is no universal standard concerning fiction or short stories. One can approach a level of excellence, i.e. the writing is good, unique, it works, etc. The drawing has to work in concert with the words in a way that is hard to describe. “Good” drawing is a matter of whether it works with the idea, and whether or not it expresses a unique voice (along with the words). What has made The New Yorker the place many go to see good cartoons is that most of us who draw for the magazine try to create humor that comes from a unique point of view, a voice. Humor that is not recycled jokes, humor that works on several levels.
And, all that said, what is funny is extremely subjective. People are passionately opinionated about what they consider funny/not funny. This is what makes it hard to create and hard to find. The founder of The New Yorker, Harold Ross, worked extremely hard to find unique visual humor for the magazine. The artists he found and nurtured changed the landscape of visual humor in 1925.
(I write about all this in my books Funny Ladies, and Sex and Sensibility, btw)
I have come to love live tweet drawing, and it seems that others enjoy watching me do it. My latest foray into this world was last night’s Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics. The New Yorker’s website blog, The Sporting Scene, asked if I would tweet draw for them, so as the evening progressed, my editor there posted them on the site. You can see all of them here! The above drawing was done before the ceremonies began, but during the huge extravaganza, I tweeted Putin, David Remnick, Meredith Vieira, Matt Lauer, and many of the athletes in their colorful (and often very odd) outfits.