This is not a substitute for having gone in person

Yesterday was the opening of the "Cartoons from the New Yorker" exhibit at the Laumeister Art Center at Southern Vermont College in Bennington, and you really should have been there, because Bob Mankoff is extremely funny and wise and, in the space I've got, I'll only be able to skim over a bit of what he had to say, plus my photos of the cartoons from the exhibit are not nearly as sharp as the cartoons themselves.

To start with the exhibit, it consists of 100 cartoons by 20 frequent New Yorker contributors, plus a handful of covers from 1925, the first year the magazine was in business, and I'll make a somewhat negative critical comment here by wishing it were being held longer than September 9, because it would make a lovely stopover during leaf-peeping season.  

I'd also note that Mankoff is rather famously no longer with the New Yorker, but speaks eloquently about the process and discreetly about his having left for a job at Esquire.

Which means I don't know how much longer he can speak to the topic, and it's a little bit like Peyton Manning talking about the Colts and I have no idea how many New Yorker readers understood that reference at all, but a true Renaissance person can identify both Andrew Luck and Andrew Wyeth.

In any case, the New Yorker remains the New Yorker, which we'll get to in a moment, and Mankoff does understand the underpinnings.

That in turn makes this a good point at which to add that I'm aware a lot of people hate New Yorker cartoons, and that it's too easy to simply dismiss them as people who prefer humor that involves pie.

But it's not entirely inaccurate, either, and comes down to the idea that, while there's nothing wrong with Robin Williams, there's also nothing wrong with Tom Lehrer, and pity the person who, whichever his preference, cannot appreciate both.

And, since I find both Mark Russell and Prairie Home Companion unbearably smug, I'm not judging, just observing.

Thing is, social satire is like editorial cartoons: It's not required to be funny, only humorous, the humor coming from exaggeration and observation.

For instance, there's nothing funny in this Emily Flake cartoon, which is part of the exhibit, the caption reading "Are we gonna have to scrape the Daddy decal off the minivan?" 

The observation is that little kids tend to gloss over the major issues and focus on small, concrete ones. As Fred Rogers said, a little kid doesn't want to know what he's going to learn in kindergarten; he wants to know what will happen if he has to go to the bathroom.

So there is some humor in the parents having girded themselves for this agonizing discussion with their children only to be met by a ridiculous question, and there is even more humor in the underlying idea that those stupid decals can signal a family that is trying way too hard to project a public image of unalloyed joy.

And we never had those stickers, but we had that conversation and so I find this cartoon agonizingly humorous without being in the least bit funny. 

The day consisted of Mankoff's live presentation, a screening of the 2015 HBO documentary "Very Semi-Serious," about him and the New Yorker process (streamable at Prime), and a discussion with New Yorker regulars Danny Shanahan and Tom Toro, led by Jessica Ziegler, the daughter of another New Yorker regular, and the person who spearheaded the exhibit.

Here's the too-short trailer for that Oscar-nominated documentary:

A point that Mankoff makes in the film and made several times in his presentation is that he doesn't laugh when he reads submissions, because he is analyzing them.

Which makes an impression the times in the film when he chuckles a bit and then puts the cartoon in the rejection pile. 

Two things I hadn't connected until yesterday:

The first is that Charles Schulz used to advise young cartoonists to do a strip every day for a year, 365 episodes as if on deadline, and then, at the end of the year, throw them all out and start over. His point was that it takes that long to develop characters and become comfortable drawing them, as well as to develop the discipline to show up at the drawing board with the necessary regularity.

I was a little surprised, and then not at all, to hear Mankoff advise a young cartoonist in the documentary to send him 10 ideas a week for the next year, so that "you can figure out what you want to say."

The point being that, even though you don't have continuing characters, you do need to develop a continuing voice.

And, in the interview segment, Toro told of submitting by mail from California, but then traveling to New York for one of Mankoff's famous face-to-face sessions, because, he said, "Bob couldn't mentor me by email." 

His cartoons weren't selling and they weren't very good, because he was, as he said, just riffing on the Far Side and had not learned to recognize his own point of view.  (For those keeping score at home, he finally sold a cartoon to the New Yorker. It was his 610th submission.)

The other point came in connection with some questions that were asked about the editors Mankoff had worked with, and was then amplified by scenes with his boss, David Remnick, in the film.

At a newspaper, "style" means, almost entirely, objective things like whether you capitalize job titles, use "Mr." and "Mrs." and "Ms." and write numbers out or use digits.

However, magazine style includes a distinctive voice, sometimes as easy to spot as Cosmopolitan, but not hard to identify in any case: Someone who knows the trade can identify the source of an article by its sound, regardless of who wrote it.

I once faxed an article by a Sports Illustrated writer from Colorado Springs to New York and was astonished at how little of the rough copy appeared in the final issue. I think the only thing they didn't change was the name of the writer, which struck me as kind of humorous.

Not funny. Just humorous.

Point being that the Powers That Be at the New Yorker hire an overall editor who will recognize and preserve that voice, and that editor then hires a cartoon editor who shares the vision and that cartoon editor buys cartoons that fit the style of the magazine.

That's true at every magazine, but particularly relevant when you have a magazine in which the cartoons are central to the identity of the publication, and so definitely in tune with its voice and vision and style, and, thus, the New Yorker remains the New Yorker, or at least it better if it wants to stick around.

Now, I see by the word counter on my blogging software that I've already gone well overlength, so I'll call it a day, but I'm sure I'll return to this in future, and, if I had to stop short of telling it all, well, I guess that's why you should have been there.

But some of it is in this "60 Minutes" feature:

 And here's a 2013 version of his talk, about a third of which was also in yesterday's talk: 

All of which makes this even longer than I wanted it to be, but I still left out a lot of cool stuff.

It was worth being there.

Comments

[Nelson Dewey]

Bob Barnes (The Better Half) gave me similar advice — but he suggested drawing (then burning) 1000 cartoons.

[David Evans]

Thank you for coming, and thanks for this thoughtful essay!--David Evans, President, Southern Vermont College