Cartooning for Life Robert Mankoff | Big Think

Cartooning for Life

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Robert Mankoff was always funny, but that doesn’t mean that his path to the New Yorker was an easy one – he submitted 2,000 cartoons to the magazine before being published. He charts his cartooning career and explains the unique struggles of being a cartoon editor.

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Robert Mankoff:

A cartoonist and the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, Bob Mankoff is one of the nation’s leading commentators on the role of humor in American business, politics, and life.

A successful entrepreneur, he created The Cartoon Bank (now a New Yorker Magazine company), the world’s largest and most influential cartoon licensing businesses.

Bob edited The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, the best-selling coffee table book for holiday 2004, featuring all 68,647 cartoons ever published in The New Yorker since its debut in 1925. Bob has edited dozens of other cartoon books and published four of his own. He appears frequently on network talk shows, cable TV networks, and syndicated radio programs.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Were you funny as a child?

Robert Mankoff: Yeah, I think I discovered sort in the sixth grade about that in some way I was funny, and both this gave me a power I did not have before – a type of attention, and so I can sort of remember at that time you know saying oh you know I’m looking at the world a little differently, I’m funny. And this is a little bit like a lot of research that’s going now on in terms of this idea that talent is overrated. There’s a difference you know that you suggest hey I’m sort of good at this whether it’s shooting baskets or maybe being funny, and then you start to work at it; then becomes something you consciously and unconsciously practiced. You know so by the time I was in high school and stuff you know I was scanning the horizon of every social situation to see the incongruities to process it to see if I could make some sort of joke.

Question: What was your first published cartoon?

Robert Mankoff: I do. That was 1974, and it was in The Saturday Review of Literature, and it’s interesting how dated all the parts of it is. It has Superman at a personnel office, and the guy is saying fastest than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound; what no steno. Steno now you know what no steno. Now that was funny you see the rhythm of that is funny. You know just even saying steno, and in a way that actually when you’re talking about one of the constituents of humor is that in humor you know when one script changes to another in humor like here it’s Superman he’s great, but the script changes to always diminishes what previously had exist; where art elevates it. I’ll give you another example. You know so when you draw a cartoon just the setting is a type of default script. If I draw a cartoon in a doctor’s office or another cartoonist does, you see a doctor. Ah, it’s a doctor. Doctors are not legible. They know a lot about medicine. They’ve been trained. They care about you. Your welfare is very important to them. Now of course it’s a cartoon that’s the script the in the back of your mind, but you know that can’t be the script. That creates the tension there.

What is gonna happen here? It can’t be saying oh, let me really help you Mr. Ferguson. Instead, he starts off continuing that script in a way because it seems solicitous. It said you’ll be awake during the entire operation. The anesthesiologist is on vacation. Now all of a sudden that becomes very, very horrible, but it diminishes the script of the doctor. And that’s one of the things humor does. It always diminishes. It’s one of the problems people you know have with it, and it’s one of the certainly problems that teachers had with me because being a wise guy I like to think of myself as the class satirist, but you know they probably thought of me as the class jerk you know causing trouble because for instance let’s say I would do a cartoon in class you a drawing script of not paying attention, not doing what I was supposed to do. You know and then the teacher – the way teachers would certainly when I was growing up; their enunciation patterns when they didn’t like you were to split your name Mike and my name Robert at that time not Bob into two syllables and say Ro-bert if it’s so funny maybe you’d like to share it with the rest of the class. Drawing a cartoon I’d say yes I would, so just that type of thing which in a personal way I found a power in humor.

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