Here is the link to the transcipt, and a few of my cartoons. I will post the video of the speech soon.

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)