Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (39 page)

You were a teenager during a period when comics were beginning to be criticized as being harmful for kids. Were your parents influenced by the 1954 anticomic screed,
Seduction of the Innocent
, by the psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham? The book implied that comic books would quickly lead our nation’s children to ruin.

I think it might have been more of a class issue. My parents thought comic books were for stupid people, and if I didn’t want to be a stupid person with a stupid job who was going to live a stupid life in a stupid apartment and marry a stupid husband and have stupid children, then I shouldn’t be reading comic books.

I did manage to borrow some issues of
Mad
magazine from my cousin. I loved Don Martin and the way he wrote out all those amazing noises his characters made. I loved the way his characters’ shoes would bend—you know, the top part of the shoe would sort of bend over at a ninety-degree angle. He just drew
funny
. I’ve never forgotten one cartoon in particular, for some reason: A man in a bathroom is using a towel-dispensing machine, and a sign says: P
USH
D
OWN
AND
P
ULL
U
P
.
This guy takes the whole machine and pushes it down and pulls it up, and rips it off the wall. The joke itself wasn’t even that great. It was just the way Don Martin drew the guy’s expression. He drew great expressions. He’s just hilarious. And so original.

Did your parents allow
Mad
in the house?

No.

Were
Archie
comics allowed in the house?

To my parents,
Archie
was the devil. So, of course, that’s what I wanted to read the most. I thought
Archie
comics were fantastic. Even though they already seemed kind of dated when I was reading them in the sixties, Archie and Jughead and Betty and Veronica were very seductive to me.

Seduction of the innocent.

Right. It was sort of a parallel universe with all these people who didn’t look like they lived anywhere near Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn. There were no girls with beehive hairdos, or people who would punch you in the school hallways for no apparent reason.

What did Manhattan represent to you, as someone who grew up right across the East River?

Speaking of parallel universes! It was a different world for me, and it was magical. When I was young, I attended weekend art classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan, and I really liked it. As I got older—after I moved to the city—I loved it even more.

As for my career goals, I never,
ever
thought that I would one day be published in
The New Yorker
. I was hoping that maybe, fingers crossed, I might one day have a strip in
The
Village Voice
, because that’s where Stan Mack and Jules Feiffer were publishing their cartoons.

Jules Feiffer—just great, funny, insightful social commentary. The writing and drawing were a great combination. To me, it’s crucial. It can’t be just,
Here’s
the writing,
here’s
the illustration. The two have to add something to each other and they have to be intertwined in a deep way.

What was the magazine-cartoon market like in the late seventies?

There were very few outlets. When I first began to sell my cartoons in the late seventies, I was mostly dropping them off at
The
Village Voice
and
National Lampoon
. I was once assigned to do an illustration for the
Voice
about corporal punishment in schools, and I drew a female teacher standing on a desk, in an S&M leather outfit, cracking a whip. I guess I thought it was funny. Other people didn’t think so. The “golden age of cartooning,” as the cartoonist Sam Gross used to call it, was finished by this point. It used to be that all of the male cartoonists—and they were pretty much
all
male—would put their work into a portfolio each week. First, they’d go to
The New Yorker
, because that was the top of the heap. Whatever cartoons weren’t bought would be taken to the editors of the next tier, like
The
Saturday Evening Post
or
Ladies’ Home Journal
or
McCall’s
. They would make the rounds and work their way down the list, to the very bottom—maybe eventually even to [the pornographic men’s magazine]
Gent
.

That process was already over when I started to pitch my cartoons to magazines in the late seventies. For one thing, there were so few magazines publishing cartoons. It was much more difficult to place them. It was pretty much down to
The New Yorker
and
National Lampoon
. There was
Playboy
, but that wasn’t on my list.

Did you always write your own cartoons? Or did you have outside gag writers help you?

No, I always wrote my own. Gag writers were more common in the past. The tradition of the gag writer selling cartoon ideas to an artist had begun to end in the sixties. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as gag writers until I became a cartoonist. A lot of famous cartoonists used them, like Peter Arno, George Price . . . even Charles Addams would sometimes buy gags—which really freaked me out.

When I first started, for maybe the first seven or eight years I would receive packets from gag writers. And that was very weird. The envelopes would arrive, and I’d just go,
Arrrghhhhh!

I knew that these people were going through a list of cartoonists’ names, and mine was on there somewhere. The gags were always very traditional and mostly pretty lame: “Two guys standing in a bar talking,” and then there’d be a corny punch line you’d read eighty times before. It was obvious they’d never seen a single cartoon of mine.

Who exactly were these gag writers? Were they doing it for fun, or did they actually make a living at it?

I have no idea. I don’t think they were young people, because I can’t imagine a young person doing such a thing. I always imagined them as middle-aged men living alone in small apartments above stores on main streets in sad, grim towns. Even the envelopes the gags came in were sad—all crumply and yellowed and hand-addressed in a saddish way.

By the time I got to
The New Yorker
, almost everyone wrote their own gags. I think maybe some of the really old-timers were buying gags. When
The New Yorker
just began, for the first twenty years or so, the captions to cartoons weren’t usually written by the cartoonist. In the sixties, the balance started to tip in favor of the artist and writer being one and the same.

How old were you when you sold your first cartoon to
The New Yorker
?

I was twenty-three. I went under contract at the end of that first year. I think a lot of it had to do with my being in the right place at the right time. Maybe the magazine wanted to attract younger readers. Lee Lorenz was the art editor at the time. I will always be grateful to him.

Did you feel that
The New Yorker
wanted to include underground cartoonists and their sensibility in the magazine?

No, not underground, exactly. I didn’t have that sense at that time at all. I think they just wanted to open it up a little to maybe a “younger sensibility.”

The cartooning was becoming less rigid than it used to be, looser. There were no more cannibal jokes. There were fewer cocktail party cartoons. No bums or winos. Or, at the very least, if those were the subjects of the cartoons, then they had to be handled differently by the cartoonist. A lot of subjects weren’t considered funny anymore.

Do you think that it helped your chances that you were a female cartoonist? There weren’t many at
The New Yorker
at the time.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t only because I was female. I signed my cartoons
R
. They didn’t know
what
I was.

I think there was only one other female
New Yorker
cartoonist in the late seventies, although there’d been more in the past, like Mary Petty, Barbara Shermund, and Helen Hokinson. Now there are about five. I didn’t think much about the “female” thing. I like to think that everyone I love is an influence in some tiny way. And even with people I hate, I think, That’s something I
never
want to do.

Did you find those early
New Yorker
cartoons misogynistic or their humor too male-centric? There has been criticism over the years about James Thurber and his possibly stereotypical portrayal of the harping wife.

Most people drawing cartoons are guys; they draw things from a male perspective. I don’t usually get too bent out of shape about that, because it doesn’t help me. It just makes me agitated. The subject of what guys find funny, what women find funny, and how sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don’t, is a complicated one. I really loved
The Comeback
, a very short-lived comedy with Lisa Kudrow [HBO, 2005]. Whereas a movie like [2012’s Seth MacFarlane–directed]
Ted
, and how successful it is—that’s a ticket to Depressionland for me. Not that I’ve seen it. Maybe it’s a real side-splitter. I don’t care about drawings of harping wives. Some wives harp.

How much were you paid for your first
New Yorker
cartoon?

Two hundred fifty dollars.

How much are you paid today for a
New Yorker
cartoon?

One thousand three hundred fifty dollars.

What was the reaction to your first
New Yorker
cartoon, published in 1978? Even looking at it today, I find it to be very odd and different. It’s called “Little Things,” and it features bizarre shapes with funny names: “chent,” “spak,” “kabe,” “tiv,” and so on. There’s no gag—at least in the traditional sense.

I think a lot of readers were pretty perturbed. Some of the older
New Yorker
cartoonists were really bothered by that cartoon, too. It’s strange that Lee chose that one. I had submitted fifty or sixty, and this was the weirdest in the batch. It was so rough and personal, and it was so weird. [Laughs] Later, Lee told me that somebody had asked him whether he owed my family any money.

It was certainly a break from the type of
New Yorker
cartoon that came before.

I knew that my cartoons were quite different, which is why I never really thought they would appear in
The New Yorker
. I never deliberately set out to be different; that’s just how I draw. But if I tried to conform to somebody else’s idea of what’s funny, I’d have no compass at all. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

I don’t dislike genre cartoons. In fact, I have done quite a few. I love tombstone gags, end-of-the-world guy gags, pushcart gags. But my favorite cartoonists have been the ones who create specific cartoon
worlds
, not just come up with a good gag line. I like being able to imagine what’s in the rooms of the house that I’m not seeing in that particular cartoon. Like what’s in those people’s refrigerator.

It’s hard to draw—at least in detail—worlds that you don’t know. I don’t know what’s in a penthouse refrigerator. Expensive champagne? Maybe some really old capers?

Has
The New Yorker
’s submission process changed for you since you first began?

No, it hasn’t changed much at all. I’ve submitted, let’s see: thirty years times forty-six weeks on average a year . . . whatever that is, since I first started, and I still do it basically the same way. Each week I submit between five and ten cartoons. Usually, about six or seven.

And how many, on average, will be accepted each week?

It’s really hard to say. I might average one per issue for maybe three or four weeks in a row, but then I might go for three or four weeks and not sell any. And then the next week, for no reason at all, it seems, they’ll buy two. I’ll feel great, but then I’m back to square one. It’s a cycle, but it’s frightening because I never know if the cycle will remain stuck on my not selling anything.

Someone once told me about a psychological experiment that was done with rats: If you keep rewarding the rats with a pellet each time they push a lever, they will eventually become bored and stop pushing the lever. And if they receive no pellets at all, they’ll get discouraged and stop pushing the lever. But if you provide them with intermittent, random pellets, they just keep pushing that lever. Sometimes I feel like I am that rat.

It’s a tough business. You only feel as good as your last sale. Even this many years later, I still get depressed if I haven’t made a sale for a couple of weeks. I always feel like that’s the end of it, you know—
I really have run out of ideas!

You would think that by now I would understand that when I get depressed, it’s part of the cycle. But it’s still hard. The fact is, there are no guarantees. I don’t know too many cartoonists who are superconfident people.

Do you hand-deliver these cartoons to
The New Yorker
office?

I used to go every week, but it just took too much time. In the eighties, I’d have a weekly lunch with the rest of
The New Yorker
cartoonists. But when we all moved out of the city, the group disbanded. I feel I can better use my time to stay at home and work. Or procrastinate.

Once a week, I fax a batch of rough sketches to
The New Yorker
offices. I try to draw pretty much what the finished cartoon will look like. You know, if people are standing in a room, I’ll sketch the room, but I won’t put in all of the fine detail until the cartoon is bought. The initial versions are always rough. If they buy it, I do a
finish
—a finished version of the sketch.

How long does a finish take?

For a very simple drawing, it might take an hour and a half. For a more complicated one, especially those in color, it might take several hours.

What exactly goes on in a
New Yorker
cartoon meeting? To me—and, I think, to many others—
The New Yorker
is like the Kremlin. It’s a world of mystery, smoke, and mirrors.