Review by New York Times Review
BOB MANKOFF is The New Yorker's cartoon editor as well as a cartoonist himself. "I may not have the best job in the world, but I'm in the running," he writes in the introduction to his book "How About Never - Is Never Good for You? My Life in Cartoons," which is not just a charming memoir but also a charming grab bag of cartoon history, cartoon theory (nothing too woolly) and shoptalk. The title is taken from Mankoff's best-known drawing. Businessman on phone, consulting datebook: "No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?" As its author points out - false modesty is not one of his faults - that line has entered the vernacular, alongside other classics from the magazine such as "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it" (drawing by Carl Rose, caption by E.B. White); "Well, back to the old drawing board" (Peter Arno); and "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" (Peter Steiner). Like any true artist, Mankoff approaches his craft with love and rigor. "I take cartoons very seriously, and I expect the people who draw them to do the same," he warns. In the mid-1970s, when he himself was already a graduate school dropout (psychology) and a published cartoonist (Saturday Review) but not yet a New Yorker cartoonist, Mankoff spent days in the New York Public Library poring over bound volumes of the magazine, all the way back to its birth in 1925, in an effort to crack the code. His conclusion: New Yorker cartoons could be many things, but at bottom "they made the reader think." I should note, as Mankoff does, that The New Yorker didn't invent the captioned, single-panel cartoon, but under the magazine's auspices the form was modernized and perfected; Arno, for one, ought to be as celebrated as Picasso and Matisse, or at least Ernst Lubitsch. But if The New Yorker has long been the pinnacle, "the Everest of magazine cartooning," as Mankoff puts it, the surrounding landscape has become more of a game preserve, with a sad, thinned herd of outlets. In olden days, when rejected drawings could be pawned off on, among many others, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Ladies' Home Journal or National Lampoon, a young cartoonist could afford the years it might take to breach The New Yorker - Mankoff himself made some 2,000 total submissions before he sold his first drawing to the magazine, in 1977. Today there are probably more people alive who speak Gullah or know how to thatch a roof than there are first-rate panel cartoonists. As the art form's primary gatekeeper since 1997, when he succeeded Lee Lorenz as The New Yorker's cartoon editor, Mankoff is aware of his dual, at times conflicting, responsibilities: maintaining standards but doing a bit more diapering, burping and kitchy-kitchy-kooing than was previously thought advisable. "If New Yorker cartoons weren't going to become museum pieces," he writes, "we were going to have to be the minor leagues as well as the majors. ... In the past, 'close' had always meant 'close but no cigar' - in other words, not quite good enough to win the prize of getting into The New Yorker. However, now close could be good enough." And a good thing, too, since what Mankoff calls "affirmative action" has brought on board some of the funniest, most original cartoonists in the magazine's current bullpen, including Matthew Diffee, Alex Gregory and Zachary Kanin. Of course, one editor's close but no cigar is another editor's Montecristo; subjectivity is the whole humidor when it comes to the "gossamer" quality of a New Yorker cartoon. I'm not quoting Mankoff there but rather a fictional Mr. Elinoff, The New Yorker's cartoon editor in a 1998 "Seinfeld" episode about the alleged ungettability of the magazine's wit. That charge rankles Mankoff, and spurs him to a discussion of what makes a cartoon funny or not - potentially as arid a subject as the endless deserts cartoon protagonists still crawl across, one hand raised, in search of ... "Water!" Though he twice quotes E.B. White's famous warning - Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it - Mankoff can be as clinical as anyone when he so chooses, noting, for instance, that "an enigmatic image in need of humorous clarification by a one-line caption became the hallmark of New Yorker cartoons." I prefer this observation, one of the sharpest things I've ever read about what goes into being funny, spun from a remembrance of Mankoff's youth as a class clown in 1950s Queens: "Acting outrageously makes it that much easier to think unconventionally. If you don't have a silly bone in your body, you're not going to have a funny bone, either. And if you can't combine a mature intelligence with some immature thinking, you're never going to be funny enough to make a living at it." as fans of his Cartoon Bureau blog know, that's Mankoff at his best: lucid, illuminating and encouraging - encouraging in the sense that, contra White, you may still want to look at a few cartoons after closing this book. There are plenty here as well, by Mankoff and his colleagues, past and present, illustrating various points about drawing, writing and editing. The point is, cartoons are work, and given what his job entails, it's a miracle Mankoff's funny bone hasn't been ground down to mildly amused splinters. Each week, he writes, he sifts through approximately 500 submissions from the magazine's regular cartoonists, plus another 500 from hopefuls. That 1,000 gets culled to 50 or so, which he takes to The New Yorker's editor, David Remnick, who then selects the 17 or so that will see print. (At 1.7 percent, that's a smaller acceptance rate than Stanford's 5.07.) As an experiment, to see whether my own sense of humor could withstand a similar battering of ink washes, Rapidograph lines and animals acting like Upper West Siders, I spent an afternoon with three of the magazine's recent "Cartoons of the Year" annuals, plowing through more than 800 drawings. After a paltry 100 or so, genuine pleasure gave way to intellectual recognition that a given cartoon might, in a technical sense, be humorous, but this recognition was devoid of actual mirth; I was Spock on "Star Trek," acknowledging human emotion but not feeling it. And then boom: At around 600 cartoons, I was a marathoner breaking through "the wall," or someone at a Grateful Dead concert whose acid trip peaks just as the band segues into "St. Stephen" - I reached a kind of cartoon flow-state, a punch-line-induced freeing of the mind. Now, everything was funny. Honestly, I can't imagine how Mankoff does it. In part, his book can be read as a defense of his stewardship - mostly inspired, I think - of the national treasure that is the New Yorker cartoon. To the perennial gripe that the cartoons aren't as funny as they used to be, Mankoff's short answer is: "They never were." It's true. I conducted another experiment, pulling three random issues of the magazine off local library shelves, from 1933, 1965 and 1997; each batch of vintage cartoons produced the same amount of chuckles, snorts of recognition, mehs, groans and huh?'s as would those in any recent issue (minus jokes at the expense of Africans, Native Americans, Gypsies, Jews and wives who won't shut up). Mankoff believes that people tend to forget cartoons they didn't like, remembering only the keepers, which gives the past a perpetual leg up. Plus ça change, as they say. Which could be a New Yorker cartoon caption itself - maybe for a George Booth drawing of two bored codgers sitting on the porch of a shack in the middle of nowhere? Not bad, if I say so myself. Definitely beats the one Elaine came up with in that "Seinfeld" episode, a pig at a complaint window saying, "I wish I was taller." By the way, there are still complaint windows in New Yorker cartoons, along with suggestion boxes, post-coital cigarettes, mobsters with their feet in tubs of cement and, fortunately for castaways, desert islands. Long may they all endure. 'If you don't have a silly bone in your body, you're not going to have a funny bone, either.' BRUCE HANDY is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 1, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Mankoff was close to earning a PhD in psychology when he finally admitted that cartooning was his true calling. He developed his distinctive dot style as a vehicle for his heady sense of humor, had his first cartoon published in the New Yorker in 1977, and has been serving as the magazine's cartoon editor since 1997. In a witty mix of memoir and New Yorker cartoon history exuberantly illustrated with New Yorker cartoons past and present, Mankoff discusses his mother's complicated influence (Humor thrives on conflict), how his psychology background helps him understand what makes cartoons funny or thought-provoking, and why he created the Cartoon Bank, which transformed the profession. He also unveils the magazine's cartoon selection process under editors William Shawn, Tina Brown, and David Remnick and describes his own rigorous assessment of 1,000 cartoons a week. Other cartoonists describe their working methods, and Mankoff even offers inside information on the New Yorker's devilishly difficult Cartoon Caption Contest, which the late great movie critic Roger Ebert won in 2011 after 107 tries. A cartoon lover's feast.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Mankoff's (The Naked Cartoonist) memoir of life as the cartoon editor of the New Yorker, how he got there, and what he has seen and learned along the way, is a must-read for devotees of the magazine and is as funny as the best of his own work. The title is taken from what Mankoff calls "by far the most popular cartoon" he's ever done, one that has become part of the American vernacular: a businessman talking into a telephone while looking at his appointment book, who says, "No, Thursday's out. How about never-is never good for you?" Mankoff traces his career from his youth in New York City, when the fluent Yiddish spoken by his mother-a language "combining aggression, friendliness, and ambiguity, a basic recipe for humor"-heavily influenced him. The book generously displays New Yorker cartoons by Mankoff and others from earlier (Peter Arno, Charles Addams) and contemporary (Roz Chast and Bruce Eric Kaplan) generations of artists. In this way, How About Never serves up not only a mini-collection of great cartoons but also as a look at the shift in styles through the editorships of legendary William Shawn, Tina Brown, and current editor David Remnick. Mankoff also provides a very funny and insightful look at how to win the New Yorker cartoon caption contest. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Part glib memoir and part cartoon anthology from the cartoon editor for the New Yorker. The most fascinating part takes readers inside the process of just how these cartoons are inspired, created and selected for publication. Mankoff (The Naked Cartoonist: Ways to Enhance Your Creativity, 2002) knows how tough it can be for an artist to achieve that career pinnacle and what an honor it is to be a regular contributorparticularly now that so many other publications that might have provided a similar market for cartoonists have either folded or no longer use the drawings. It's also a precarious position: "I think every cartoonistindeed, everyone who's funny for moneyfears that either they'll stop being funny or whoever decides what's funny will think they have. Little did I know that one day I'd be in the whoever role." Breezy text alternates with lots of cartoonsthe author's own and others'as he details how he went from years of being rejected by the New Yorker to his early acceptances to his current role as a gatekeeper. As Mankoff notes, the magazine makes that gate difficult to penetrate, with those under contract expected to deliver 10 or so cartoons every week so that maybe one might be selected. After starting from that prescreened 1,000 per week, he writes, "eventually I cull the pile down to fifty or so" and then take those to the weekly Wednesday meeting, where editor David Remnick will ultimately pass judgment on which 17 or so will be published. Mankoff offers a number of tips on the "intelligent humor" that makes it into the New Yorkerand even how to better your odds in the weekly caption processbut the one that trumps all others: "Make David Remnick laugh." Those who aspire to a career drawing for the New Yorker will find this essential readingor just give up.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
