All human life... captured by the cartoonist’s art
BAck in the longdistant days, before the arrival of the internet and Twitter with their seemingly inexhaustible supply of people and animals falling over or into things, what was it that most made us laugh?
Gather round, children: we called them cartoons. They appeared in things called newspapers and magazines.
And of the latter, none has a greater legacy of the cartoonists’ art than the New Yorker.
In Britain there was Punch, but that long ago closed (its brilliant cartoon editor Michael Heath escaped to the Mail On Sunday and The Spectator). And however unpatriotic it might be to say it, Punch’s cartoons were never as consistently brilliant.
Or perhaps the fact that the New Yorker is in almost every other respect a very serious magazine is what makes its cartoons stand out: in the middle of a 20,000-word article about the threat of climate change, a dazzling shaft of wit is such a welcome relief — and reward.
Now you can have all the reward without the hard work. It comes in the form of an encyclopaedia of the best cartoons to appear in the New Yorker since its first publication in 1925.
If you think the word encyclopaedia is too grand for such content, know that this is a monumental (and monumentally heavy) two volumes of over 1,500 pages, arranged by subject matter in alphabetical order.
It is a labour of love by Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of the New Yorker for 20 years (19972017), a contributor for over 40, and one of whose own cartoons (from 1993) is the most quoted ever to appear in the magazine.
It shows a man in an office, holding the phone while looking through his diary, saying: ‘No, Thursday’s out. How about never — is never good for you?’
This sardonic, urban humour is the distinctive New Yorker brand, a true reflection of the city in which it is rooted. And that predominantly Jewish tradition can be very dark.
For example, one from 1989, showing a man with a briefcase, trying to force his way through a crowd surrounding an inert body. He tells them: ‘Let me through. I’m a lawyer.’
Blacker still (since New York was for so long the centre of the Mafia’s commercial activities), there is a 2005 cartoon showing a cute little girl holding the hand of her sinister-looking father, and saying: ‘Daddy, can I have a pony killed?’
But the subject matter covered in these volumes is universal, not local. None more so than the way in which they capture with piercing precision the unchanging and eternally puzzling human condition (relationships, ageing, dying). They start right at the beginning with Adam and Eve gags.
My favourite of these shows a somewhat debauched Adam saying to a Brigitte Bardot-ish Eve (while being chased out of Paradise by an angry-looking God): ‘Just for the record, I knew you were naked before I ate the apple.’
As this is an encyclopaedia, Adultery follows immediately after Adam and Eve, and we have an unshaven man in a bar saying to his drinking companion: ‘What I don’t, like, get is how, she, like, figured out I was, like, having an affair with, like, the babysitter.’
This cartoon, by Danny Shanahan, dates from 2001. One of the startling aspects of these volumes is just how quickly the cartoonists spot an emerging trend, and satirise it.
Nowadays, we all know this is the way that young adults, like, talk. But in 2001?
Alternatively, perhaps this is just the proof that trends and indeed entire industries develop first on the New Yorker’s side of the Atlantic, and wash across to Blighty years later.
For example, another Shanahan cartoon has a man in a bookshop saying to the woman at the till: ‘No café latte? And you call yourself a bookstore?’ This was published in 1994.
I think anyone in England reading that edition of the New Yorker a quarter of a century ago would simply not have understood the joke. Now, we do.
Ageing, however, never ages. For example, a 1989 cartoon by Robert Weber in which a balding man of mature years looks into a mirror with an expression on his face which I can describe only as half-wistful, half-hopeful, and tells his wife: ‘If I were a dog I’d be only nine years old.’
This might or might not have been an inspiration (he is a genius who requires no precedent) for the British cartoonist Matt.
For my 50th birthday he sent me a cartoon of two dogs — looking just like the ones we then had. One says to the other: ‘I just can’t believe that Dominic is 350 years old.’
But there is no rule that says that cartoons about ageing — not to mention dying — have to be funny. Some of the best are as bleak as the truth can be.
FOR example, one of Mankoff’s — and he chooses more of his own than any other cartoonist’s work — shows a very elderly couple on a porch, the man telling his wife: ‘No, I don’t want to live forever, but I damn sure don’t want to be dead forever, either.’ The human predicament, in a sentence.
A developing theme in these volumes is the way humanity itself is — or fears that it is — being superseded by computers.
The earliest example dates from 1958. I am most familiar with it, since my stepfather, the philosopher Sir Alfred Ayer, bought the original: it hung outside the loo in the house he shared with my mother.
It shows a vast computer (they all were, in those days); two scientists are scrutinising the tape that has emerged from it. One, looking startled, tells his colleague: ‘I’ll be damned. It says: “Cogito, ergo sum.” ’
I remember that I always smiled when I saw it — no matter how familiar it became. That is the joy of the greatest cartoons. The joke never wears thin. So neither will these volumes.