Friday, December 29, 2006

New Yorker cartoons

Here's a fun article from the Washington Post about how cartoons are chosen for the New Yorker.

The article mentions Matthew Diffee's acceptance rate: 1 cartoon out of 10 in a good week. Otherwise none. That reminds me of what Ted Williams supposedly said when asked about how it felt to hit .400: "How would you feel if your boss gave you ten jobs to do and you did four of them successfully?" I always wanted to add, "And how would your boss feel?"

4 comments:

mrjumbo said...

The book Diffee just edited, by the way, is a lot of fun. You'll digest it in about 45 minutes, but it's highly entertaining to see what the New Yorker would look like without the damper on taste.

Anonymous said...

Really a nice article. The cartoon that's featured on the online layout page—showing Remnick, Mankoff, and Lewis with three baskets in front of them—is definitely not New-Yorker-worthy, though. But the whole text is quite insightful and I understand Diffee's feeling frustrated most of the time. However, the mere fact that he can live off of one caption a week (or less) just blows my mind. How can this guy be frustrated? The artist's ego must be bigger than his "greedy" hands.

"I was in a different place then." How fucking funny is that? (Pardon my French.) I remember the Seinfeld episode pretty well. I also belong into the category of people who don't always get the cartoons/captions, so I have a sympathy for Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer.

Anonymous said...

The current winter fiction issue has a nice example of what I mentioned before. There are two cartoons on pages 106 & 107. I absolutely do not get the one on p.106 (and I really tried), whereas I find the cartoon on p.107 extremely witty. Maybe someone could explain '106' to me.
I also find this one just hysterical. What was Remnick thinking when he said, "Yes"? :o)

Andrew Shields said...

107 could be about Walter Mitty! :-)

106 takes a cliché about novels, "I couldn't put it down," and uses it in a different context where it becomes absurd. A common "New Yorker" device.

That S&M Santa one definitely seems to violate Remnick's rule about decency! :-)