My visual memory isn’t all that great, but I can still picture the refrigerator at my mother’s house where I grew up. It was covered with New Yorker cartoons from the early and mid-’80s: J. B. Handelsman’s dunderheaded editor (“I wish you would make up your mind, Mr. Dickens. Was it the best of times or was it the worst of times? It could scarcely have been both”); Bob Mankoff’s three stippled fish (small fish: “There is no justice in the world”; medium fish: “There is some justice in the world”; big fish: “The world is just”). And I don’t want to claim that these cartoons changed my life (fish lesson aside, I’m neither an oligarch nor an Occupier), but maybe they did affect me at some level. I’m a writer who favors the comically fraught. I like my wonder—and my terror—tempered with one-liners.
So I’m an especially good audience for How About Never—Is Never Good for You?, Mankoff’s recently published memoir. “I feel if something is worth saying,” Mankoff writes in the book’s introduction, “it’s worth saying funny.” Mankoff has been the New Yorker’s cartoon editor since 1997; he blogs and lectures widely on cartoons and comic theory. He’s been thinking for decades about why we laugh: as a class cutup at Syracuse in the mid-’60s; as a graduate student in experimental psychology during the Vietnam War (“Look, I was as patriotic as the next guy, so long as the next guy was a draft dodger”); as an aspiring New Yorker cartoonist in the mid-’70s (his first cartoon for the magazine was published in 1977; he has since published over 900 more). When he writes about the mysteries of the comic (“Humor contains contradictions; it does not resolve them but revels in them”), he’s writing with a lifetime’s worth of authority. Here’s a passage from his memoir’s first chapter (winningly titled “I’m Not Arguing, I’m Jewish”):
My mother spoke fluent Yiddish. As I was growing up, she would variously call me a klainer hunt (“little dog”), a groisser ferd (“big horse”), and, when I was particularly annoying, a narvez choleryeh (“nervous plague”—literally, cholera). All of those terms, both endearing and insulting, are the kind of two-faced communication Yiddish excels at, combining aggression, friendliness, and ambiguity, a basic recipe for humor that my mother was excellent at cooking up and on which I was spoon-fed.
(Mankoff’s father also excelled at this form of communication. Bragging to his friends, the elder Mankoff said: “They laughed when my son said he was going to be a cartoonist, but they’re not laughing now.”)
The laughs throughout the memoir are infectious (narvez choleryeh!) and instructive. When a new cartoonist asks Editor Mankoff why he requires a submission of at least ten cartoons, he answers, “Because in cartooning, as in life, nine out of ten things don’t work out.” But the book is a memoir in only the loosest sense: it’s light on the “me,” by memoir standards. To give just one example, Mankoff skips past wives one and two, introducing us at the book’s midpoint to his third and current wife, Cory Scott Whittier. (“Getting remarried had almost become the norm, with two being the new one, but getting re-remarried still had the whiff of three strikes and you’re out about it.”) The memoir’s subtitle, My Life in Cartoons, does double-duty: Mankoff tells his story, on nearly every page, with the help of cartoons (his own and those of many others, including Saul Steinberg, James Thurber, Bruce Eric Kaplan, and Roz Chast), and he focuses on his life in the cartoon business.
Have you ever wondered how many cartoons the New Yorker’s cartoon editor reads per week? The answer: About five hundred from regular contributors, and another five hundred from everyone else. (Mankoff then chooses fifty or so to pass on to David Remnick, the New Yorker’s editor. Remnick selects about seventeen to appear in the magazine.) Have you ever wondered which non-cartoonists have tried to push their cartoons into the cartoon editor’s hands? Mankoff mentions two: Norman Mailer (“He later published them in a book called Modest Gifts. Let’s just say it was a very apt title”) and David Mamet (“I sent a note back to him, thanking him and saying I had taken the liberty of sending him a play”).
Mankoff gave a talk last weekend at the Jewish Community Center in Ann Arbor. I never go anywhere because I have two little kids who always want attention, but I went to listen to the cartoonist whose signature line—the title of his memoir—now appears in The Yale Book of Quotations, opposite a quotation from “that other famous humorist, Mao Zedong.” (It also appears—unauthorized—on a thong.) My aural memory is no better than my visual memory, but I can still hear Mankoff’s laugh as it filled the JCC. He has—you won’t be surprised to hear this—a great, great laugh.
