Bob Mankoff pays tribute to James Thurber's decisive role "in shaping the modern 'New Yorker' cartoon"

This is the cartoon with which, Bob Mankoff says, Thurber changed the course of cartooning "in one fell swoop" in 1932.

by Ken

I indicated in my first quick take Sunday night on the celebration of Thurber earlier that evening at the 92nd Street Y ringmastered by Keith Olbermann that I would probably want to come back to it, and even after sort of doing so parenthetically in my Tuesday post about Keith's Rolling Stone interview remarks about Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw, I knew that there was lots of important stuff still left out.

Most importantly, perhaps, I hadn't more than mentioned the presence of New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff. Happily, Bob gives us his take on the event in his Cartoon Desk blogpost this week. As I've mentioned, you can also sign up -- for free! -- to have Bog's weekly blogposts delivered directly to your e-mailbox, and those blogposts are probably the happy-makingest thing I can look forward to finding there. Let me repeat my previous instructions, "On the home page, look down on the right side for a tab that gives you checkboxes for two weekly NEWSLETTERS: "This Week" and "Cartoons," and this time add a link for the home page, newyorker.com. Also, it's been a full four days since I blogged about Bob's blogposts ("The results of The New Yorker's search for a universal cartoon caption").

First let me say that seeing and hearing Bob in person was a treat and an insight. In his blogposts he seems so calm and logical; in person, he's kind of a wild man -- though an extremely calm and logical wild man. I'm delighted to have his account of Sunday's program. More important; he's made it possible for me to share with you the presentation he offered, which I was dreading having to try to characterize in clumsy paraphrase.

"I gave a little presentation," he writes, "claiming that, important as Thurber was to humor writing, he was even more influential in shaping the modern New Yorker cartoon."


AND HERE IS BOB'S PRESENTATION

In the early twentieth century, cartoons were illustrated anecdotes.


The same style was found in the early days of The New Yorker.


Even this refreshingly less stilted and beloved cartoon from 1928 cartoon from 1928 comes from the same template:


Something more refreshing was needed, and James Thurber provided it in one fell swoop in 1932.


That year, Thurber published an astonishing forty-two cartoons in the magazine. Other swoops -- by Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and others -- would follow, but Thurber’s was the earliest and the swoopiest. His minimalist but expressive style, later adopted by such diverse talents as Charles Barsotti, Roz Chast, Bruce Eric Kaplan (BEK), and Michael Maslin, turned out to be the perfect vehicle for delineating the small things in life which loom so large.


It was also suited to permitting the interplay between fantasy and reality that let cartoons go anywhere the imagination could take a cartoonist. Thurber created the prototype for this genre in that annus mirabilis, 1932:

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BY THE WAY, WE'VE HAD BOTH THURBER'S AND E. B. WHITE'S
ACCOUNTS OF THE SEAL-CARTOON -- OR SO I THOUGHT

Thurber's appeared in an "author's memoir" he wrote in 1950 for a new edition of his first published collection of drawings, The Seal in the Bedroom and other predicaments (1932), which I reproduced in this October 2006 post. White's more detailed account appeared in his introduction for a new edition of the book he cowrote with Thurber, Is Sex Necessary?, originally published in 1929. I'm assuming that I reproduced it in the promised follow-up post to the above, but I'll be darned if I can find it, and I'm wondering whether this was one of those follow-up posts I promised and somehow never got around to writing.

I have found a December 2010 post in which I claimed to be linking back to the post that contained the White version, but on checking that link, it turns out to be to the post I've just linked to. So for the moment you'll have to do with Thurber's more limited account. I think we'll have to schedule White's Is Sex Necessary introduction for an "E. B. White Tonight" post. (First I'll have to find the replacement copy for my missing one which I was so thrilled to have acquired online for a penny.)

OH YES, A FOOTNOTE TO THAT THURBER CARTOON
ANNUS MIRABILUS OF 1932

Bob Mankoff is amazed by that year in which Thurber published 42 cartoons in The New Yorker. In Sunday's panel, that great writer Calvin Trillin recalled having discovered in the magazine archives that in one year (if he mentioned which year, I didn't catch it) he published 51 casuals, the magazine's term for what we would call humor pieces. Trillin recalled being impressed with himself the year he topped a fellow writer by breaking their tie and having his sixth published. "One a week?" he mused.

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