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    How About Never--Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons
    How About Never--Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons
    How About Never--Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons
    Ebook447 pages2 hours

    How About Never--Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons

    By Bob Mankoff

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Memoir in cartoons by the longtime cartoon editor of The New Yorker

    People tell Bob Mankoff that as the cartoon editor of The New Yorker he has the best job in the world. Never one to beat around the bush, he explains to us, in the opening of this singular, delightfully eccentric book, that because he is also a cartoonist at the magazine he actually has two of the best jobs in the world.

    With the help of myriad images and his funniest, most beloved cartoons, he traces his love of the craft all the way back to his childhood, when he started doing funny drawings at the age of eight. After meeting his mother, we follow his unlikely stints as a high-school basketball star, draft dodger, and sociology grad student. Though Mankoff abandoned the study of psychology in the seventies to become a cartoonist, he recently realized that the field he abandoned could help him better understand the field he was in, and here he takes up the psychology of cartooning, analyzing why some cartoons make us laugh and others don't. He allows us into the hallowed halls of The New Yorker to show us the soup-to-nuts process of cartoon creation, giving us a detailed look not only at his own work, but that of the other talented cartoonists who keep us laughing week after week. For desert, he reveals the secrets to winning the magazine's caption contest.

    Throughout How About Never--Is Never Good for You?, we see his commitment to the motto "Anything worth saying is worth saying funny."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 25, 2014
    ISBN9780805095913
    How About Never--Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons
    Author

    Bob Mankoff

    Bob Mankoff is the cartoon editor for The New Yorker. Before he succeeded Lee Lorenz as editor, Mankoff was a cartoonist for the magazine for twenty years. He founded the online Cartoon Bank, which has every cartoon since the magazine's founding. He is the author of the book The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity.

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      Book preview

      How About Never--Is Never Good for You? - Bob Mankoff

      INTRODUCTION

      Since this is an introduction, I think it only appropriate that I introduce myself.

      Hi, I’m Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker magazine. I may not have the best job in the world, but I’m in the running.

      Actually, I have the best jobs in the world. For my day job, I get to see more than five hundred cartoons every week from the best cartoonists. I also moonlight as a cartoonist for The New Yorker and have contributed more than nine hundred cartoons myself. The caption of my most famous one is now so firmly entrenched in the culture as an all-purpose put-down phrase that it can be referenced as though it were an anonymous aphorism; Nancy Pelosi did just that during the 2012 election.

      Probably just a coincidence that the marketing mavens behind this book chose it as the title.

      Okay, now you have me at a disadvantage. You know a little something about me, but I know zip about you, except for one thing: you like New Yorker cartoons. Why else would you be reading this?

      Well, that makes two of us, and unless those same marketing mavens are very much mistaken, there are quite a few more likers like us. There better be. I’m sure you’re a swell person and I’m not a bad guy myself, but publishing a book for just the two of us wouldn’t make much sense.

      And as much as we both like New Yorker cartoons, it wouldn’t make sense for this book to just be another collection of New Yorker cartoons. There are plenty of those. Hey, I should know.

      So, what exactly is this book about? Long story short, me. Look, it’s a memoir, and you can’t spell memoir without the moi. But short story a little longer, it’s summed up nicely in the contract I signed to do the book.

      That pretty much lays it out and doesn’t do too bad a job, although it does underestimate the number of cartoons by a factor of three. And as contracts are not meant to be funny, it isn’t. But this book is, and not just because of the cartoons.

      I feel if something is worth saying, it’s worth saying funny. That’s why even though the contract specified forty thousand words, I ended up with only thirty-six thousand, because the other ones weren’t funny enough.

      But all the laughs have a narrative purpose: to tell my story as a person, cartoonist, and cartoon editor within the larger story of the extraordinary institution that made magazine cartooning an important part of American culture, The New Yorker. So, I’m going to, as it were, show the soup-to-nuts process of cartoon creation, selection, editing, and publishing that makes a New Yorker cartoon unique and delectable. Along the way, you’ll get to know not only me but also the fascinating cast of cartoonists and editors who make all of this possible. And for the icing on the cake, I’m going to tell you how to win our famous caption contest.

      Even though this book is relatively short, I’ve been working on it for a long time—really, my whole life as a cartoonist and cartoon editor. At least in the back of my mind I have. But a number of things precipitated moving it to the front.

      First was my reinvolvement, after a thirty-year absence, in academic psychology. In the 1970s, I was an all-but-PhD student when I quit to become a cartoonist. Some thirty years later, I discovered that the field I’d abandoned could help me better understand the field I was in, and vice versa. In my absence, an entire discipline devoted to the study of humor had sprung up.

      Putting all my all-but-PhD expertise to good use, I’ve been using cartoons to do research into humor and then using that research to better understand cartoons. One of the things I’ve learned along the way is that although humor is a fascinating topic, academics, being academics, can take the fun out of it and make it boring. Not to worry—I’m not a real academic.

      However, I won’t be constantly on. That would be as tedious as being always off. Besides, much as I hate to admit it, you can’t explain everything with a joke, especially another joke. That would lead to an infinite regression, in which each joke would have to be explained by another joke, eventually using up all the jokes in the world and leaving us with a very sad planet with one damn joke still to be explained.

      Still, there’s a middle ground, a sweet spot for the use of humor in explaining humor, and cartoons are often the spot-on way to hit it.

      Too soon?

      So, fearlessly, but hopefully not foolishly, I’ve ignored E. B. White’s famous admonition that analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. In fact, my online New Yorker newsletter is all about this

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