Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (40 page)

The deadline is late on Tuesday. Every cartoonist either e-mails or brings to the offices a batch of rough sketches, usually about five to ten. I’ve never been to a
New Yorker
art meeting where the editors talked about cartoons, which takes place on Wednesday. It’d be like peeking in on your parents and accidentally seeing them doing things you know they do, but don’t want to think about them doing.

I once read an article that described the process, but I’ve since repressed it. As much as I would like to imagine the editors saying, “
This
one is really good, but
this
one is even better!,” I know the disgusting, painful reality.

Do a lot of these ideas for cartoons gestate for a long time before you sketch them?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Often, ideas will crop up when I’m in my studio just doodling and thinking. I remember when I was drawing “The Fantastic Voyage” [
Scientific American
, July 2002]. I had been thinking about the cliché of spaceships and strange submarine-like vehicles that would travel through the body in sci-fi films from the fifties and sixties. I wondered, What if people were in a broken-down bus instead? Or in the family sedan? That’s how that cartoon came about.

I once doodled a crazy man holding a sign that read: T
HE
E
ND
IS
NEAR
!
I just felt like drawing one of these guys. Who knows why. After looking at the guy for awhile, I realized that he needed a crazy wife. So I drew him a wife, and she was holding up a sign that said: Y
OU
WISH
.
That one came out of the blue.

What ideas are you currently mulling over?

I’m working on an idea now. I wrote down, “Break Internet.” I like the thought of breaking the Internet, as if it were a toy or an appliance. Now that I describe it, it sounds pretty lame. [The cartoon was not bought.]

How extensive is your backlog of unsold cartoons?

Thousands and thousands. It’s an ocean of rejection. A lot of them are very dated, and a lot of them are just plain bad, but in that pile I will sometimes find something I want to rework. I have so many rejected drawings that it almost becomes raw material for me. When I’m stuck, I sometimes go into that file, and I’ll see if there’s an idea hiding that can be fixed.

How much time do you spend on the exact wording of your cartoons?

It really depends. Sometimes a cartoon will be very clear in my head from the minute I conceptualize it. Other times—especially with a multipanel “story” cartoon—it takes longer. I like the editing process. I think—I
hope
—that this is something I’ve gotten better at as I’ve gotten older. I probably could have done more self-editing when I was younger.

Specifically, what sort of self-editing?

Eliminating things I don’t need; paying attention to the rhythm of a joke. I don’t want to make anyone read more than absolutely necessary.

I wonder how many readers even notice how finely structured the wording is in certain cartoons—such as with your work, or Garry Trudeau’s
Doonesbury
, or Gary Larson’s
The Far Side
. There’s never an extra comma or beat.

Bad rhythm is something you see frequently with amateur cartoonists. With that said, there are times when I can feel the rhythm of a cartoon more clearly than at other times. I work on deadline, and I have to do this whether I’m in the mood to work or not. But why I’m in the mood sometimes and not at other times is still a mystery.

Do you have tricks you’ve taught yourself that have made the process less difficult?

Getting away from work and coming back to it fresh really helps. Also, Truman Capote once said that if you have to leave a manuscript or a chapter, don’t finish up the last little bit, because then, when you come back, you’ll have to restart from nothing. I’ve often used this approach. If I’m going downstairs for lunch, I leave something I’m excited to come back to—so I won’t be starting from zero miles per hour. But it doesn’t always work.

Do you consider yourself as much a writer as a cartoonist?

I don’t consider myself as much of a writer as a “real” writer—those writers who write without drawings. And I don’t consider myself as much of an artist as a “real” artist—somebody who paints without using any words. But cartooning is a hybrid, and cartoonists are hybrids. We feel incomplete doing just one or the other. When I have to write and I can’t use pictures, it’s very frustrating. You work in the medium best suited to what you have to say, and, for me, that’s cartooning.

So where do you see the art of cartooning in the future? Do you think it’ll remain a viable profession?

I don’t know how viable it is
now
. It’s a very tough profession. I really don’t know whether cartooning for magazines will stick around. There’s a lot written about teenagers and print media and how irrelevant the nonelectronic media might soon become. I really don’t know what’s going to happen. But I do know that if someone wants to become a cartoonist they’re going to find an outlet.

I’d like to learn more about animation programs. If there was a computer program that wasn’t too difficult to learn, I might just give it a shot. Hopefully you can always learn something new. Key word:
hopefully
.

Any advice for cartoonists starting out with their careers?

I’m really grateful for the life-drawing classes I took at art school. Not that anyone looking at my characters would believe it, but I think life-drawing is really important. A cartoonist has to know how a body sits or stands on a page. It’s like learning a language.

You can’t teach a cartoonist how to have a style. They can improve their own style, but it’s impossible to provide a style to someone who doesn’t have one. And that has to be learned on your own.

Do you have any regrets? It seems that no matter how successful anyone is, they always have at least one major regret.

I feel that on my deathbed, which is something I hope to eventually have, I’ll probably look back and wish that I didn’t always look on the dark side of everything. But how can you not? You could die at any time, for any reason. You’re walking under an air conditioner, and
kaboom
! My parents actually knew someone who was killed by a falling flower pot. But we have to kind of go along and put one foot in front of the other and pretend that we don’t know that everything could take a serious turn for the worse in the next second.

It’s all in the pretending.

Yes, it’s all in the pretending. Any of us could walk outside right now and Mr. Anvil could suddenly meet Mr. Top of Head. But we pretend otherwise.

Actually, that’d make for a nice cartoon.

And if I’m safely off to the side while it happens to you, and if there’s a deadline looming, I would absolutely love to draw it. [Laughs]

Contributor,
Spy, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker;
Author,
Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners

You’ve been a writer now for over thirty years. Your specialty is humorous first-person journalistic accounts. But how would you define yourself? As a journalist? Or as a humorist?

I usually say both. The writing that I seem to be known for—the first-person, fish-out-of-water, investigative, humor-type pieces—are a hybrid. I usually say, “George Plimpton, but with more leotards.”

Do such definitions matter in the industry? How important are labels for magazine and book editors looking to assign articles or seeking to purchase book manuscripts?

Well, being a prose writer who doesn’t write for TV or film, I wouldn’t be able to eat if I weren’t willing to do a certain amount of fact-gathering. If you’re going to try to make a living off of being funny in books and magazines and newspapers, you probably need either to do some reporting or be a brand-name cartoonist.

The beauty part of embracing facts is that I can get an assignment and I can get a book deal. Unless you’re, say, Steve Martin, you can’t get an assignment to write a factless humor piece, and you can’t get a book deal to write a novel. But I could go to a publisher and say, “I want to be a Mexican wrestler for a year,” or, “I want to interview everyone in Ohio named Barry,” and they might cough up some money for that.

How difficult would it be for you to get an assignment to write a factless humor piece?

I still do occasionally write pieces without facts—and like most writers, I labor under the delusion that I’ll write a novel one day, just as soon as it drops from the sky onto my head, already written. And, sure, very occasionally someone will assign me a bit o’ whimsy. But bookwise, that’s a tiny, tiny market, unless you’re working on books meant to end up next to the cash register or the toilet.

It’s possible that someone would be willing to publish all my
New Yorker
Shouts & Murmurs and the wackier of my op-eds from
The New York Times
, but I’d go into it knowing that it probably wouldn’t sell a ton.

There’s a fine line between being funny as a journalist and being overbearing—or even mean-spirited. What is that line and how is it best avoided?

I always say, The easiest three ways to make a name for yourself as a journalist are to be a really bitchy reviewer, to write a sex column, or to do Q&As that are heavy on the Qs. So, I’ve tried to avoid those things, which I usually find overbearing.

With respect to my own work—especially the material where people don’t know I’m writing about them—I try never to name or make identifiable anyone that I’m not in a professional relationship with. Like, once I took the National Dog Groomers Association’s certification test. I have limited skills in this area, despite my homosexuality. In the throes of the exam, I ended up smearing lipstick on my cocker spaniel’s snout and telling the test administrator, “I like a dog with a face.” When I wrote the experience up in an article, I made the test administrator identifiable—she and I were in a professional relationship—but not the other test-takers in the room. That distinction seems only fair to me. Likewise, if you’re selling me something, or if I’ve paid you to provide a service, you’re fair game. If you’re standing in the background, I’m gonna pixilate you.

Also, I self-deprecate a lot. The upside of self-absorption is that you don’t pay other people enough heed to hurt their feelings.

Do you ever think you’ve crossed that line into meanness?

Sure, particularly when I was younger. I did a story in
Spy
magazine once—this is going back twenty-five years—for which I stayed at a bunch of bed-and-breakfasts in Manhattan, tangling with various hosts’ unwillingness to tell me whether or not as a paying guest I was allowed to sit in their living room. One host, a distracted woman in her fifties, told me that she was going to be doing some exercises in her living room—“an activity,” I wrote, “which I could only imagine involves a lot of crouching and lotion.” I reread this line the other day and had two thoughts about it. One, it’s sort of mean and ad hominem. Two, I
am
this woman now.

I like to think that my inner compass keeps me from being condescending, but I’m sure there are people who’d be willing to tell you otherwise. Worse comes to worst, a good editor can alert you to condescension. Ignorant: sure, probably have been there, too. No, the more tricky one for me—particularly if people don’t know I’m writing about them, or if people who are being interviewed are a little more candid than they should be—is knowing whether or not I can use a juicy, possibly damning comment or revelation. I go through a whole Kübler-Ross, male-menopausal, weather storm-map-ish rinse cycle with those. I’ll ask myself, Is it something they would have told me if they knew I was writing a story? Is it worth it to me to ask them if I can use it, only to possibly have them say no? Is the speaker or doer identifiable in the story? I’m inherently a pretty polite, don’t-make-a-lot-of-waves, cheery-to-the-point-of-bland, PepperidgeFarms–y WASP, and this orientation doesn’t always scream “good reporter.”

As a journalist, you enter and write about other worlds: whether it’s the hipster community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an a capella group at Yale, or a cruise sponsored by the liberal magazine
The
Nation
. Since you’re an outsider in these situations, I’d imagine you’d want to take extra care not to appear condescending or ignorant.

I’m pretty conscious of the fact that I play on an uneven playing field. Uneven because 1) I’m the writer, so I’m always going to have the last word, and 2) sometimes I know in advance what I’m going to say before I enter the situation. For instance, I knew when I was writing my Brooklyn hipster story for
The New York Times
[“How I Became a Hipster,” May 1, 2013] that I would enter a clothing store and ask, “Are your socks local?” When I sang with the Yale Whiffenpoofs [
The
New York Times
, “Singing for Their Supper,” January 11, 2013], I knew I would tell someone at Yale that Osama bin Laden had been in an a capella group as a teen and that I wished that his group had been called Vocal Jihad. So, I’m semi-armed. Thus, it’s particularly important for me to be generous and kind in my coverage, and also to make myself look as much like an ass as possible.

What percentage of jokes, on average, are written beforehand?

Not much. Maybe 10 percent. It’s really more of a way to calm my nerves and jittery anticipation before I start reporting. And somehow it helps me focus—maybe it’s like an actor reading the whole script before he shoots. Like if you were cast on
Law & Order
, and your only line was “I didn’t do nothin’, Lenny,” but they gave you the whole script, not just your scene to read, you could then really whale on that one line. You could bring seven thousand pounds of subtext to “I didn’t do nothin’, Lenny.”

You mentioned
Spy
magazine earlier, which was infamous for combining journalism with humor. Can you see the direct influence of
Spy
on today’s journalists?

I guess I see the influence most directly when I see charticles—something like
New York
magazine’s terrific “Approval Matrix” seems like
Spy
’s offspring. I remember reading an interview with Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter,
Spy
’s founders, who said that they got the idea for funny charts from
Time
magazine, which, after notable plane crashes, would always print illustrations of where everyone was sitting on the plane.

Wit is always pretty timeless, so it’s harder to see the specific trickle-down of
Spy
’s particular acerbity. Acerbicity? Acerbitchy? The one aspect of the
Spy
legacy that, in the wrong hands, can sometimes be unfortunate is the insiderness of everything: Yes, I thought it was brilliant that
Spy
devoted a whole column to the Creative Artists Agency, and explained how some Hollywood movies are nothing but “packages,” but isn’t this the same head that wants to know weekend box-office? Not to go all Kahlil Gibran on you, but who gives a shit about ratings and BO, as I like to call it?
30 Rock
was one of the most brilliant comedies of our time, but it had crappy, crappy ratings. Do you care? I mean, you care if you’re Tina Fey or you do props for
30 Rock
, but otherwise, maybe you should consider taking up golf or Chinese brush painting.

What career advice would you give to those who want to combine journalism with humor?

Don’t cook up some hilarious essay and then go to the newsstand thinking, Who can I submit this article to? Do it the other way around: Obsessively read and reread a particular section of a magazine—maybe Shouts & Murmurs in
The New Yorker
or maybe the back page of
The New York Times
Magazine,
or maybe your local paper’s op-ed, or maybe those essays in
Details
where a writer discusses some difficult-to-reach part of his body—and then write something that’s tailored very specifically to that section of that publication. This will save you eight hundred thousand man- or woman-hours.

Additionally: Don’t do round-ups of unusual but actual state laws (“In Rhode Island, it’s illegal to serve crackers to Border collies . . .”), or parodies of year-end holiday newsletters. The world is good on those.