What better way to track trends in violence than via cartoons? ("New Yorker" cartoons, that is)

"I looked at the number of murders depicted [in New Yorker cartoons], decade by decade, starting with the nineteen-thirties. To qualify as a murder, either there needed to be a dead body in the drawing . Using these criteria, I counted a hundred and eleven murders in more than seventy-six thousand cartoons. This means the homicide rate for all New Yorker cartoons is greater than that of fourteenth-century London."

-- New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff,
in his latest blogpost, "Killing It"

by Ken

In his weekly blogpost this week, our pal Bob explores the hypothesis of Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature (given a "skeptical review" by Elizabeth Kolbert in the September 28 issue; only an abstract is available free online), "that violence" -- as Bob paraphrases -- "has been decreasing over the centuries, and now is the best of times to be alive in terms of the likelihood of staying that way."

From his researches Bob produces this table:


Which prompts this observation:

As for the better angels of our cartooning nature, the data is mixed. If The New Yorker had stopped publishing at the end of the eighties -- the magazine was much safer than New York in those years -- it would support Pinker's hypothesis. Since then, however, these pages have apparently become more lethal.

And this confession:

I became cartoon editor in 1997, so most of this happened under my watch -- and there have already been four homicides in 2011. I've turned a blind eye to all this violence for too long. But now I take full responsibility and am committed to reversing this disturbing trend. I'm beefing up police representation in cartoons and imposing the strictest gun-control laws in the cartoon industry. If all that doesn't work, well, I'll just make all of our cartoonists read Pinker's book and get with the program.

There are some swell comments onsite, like these:

Ironically, an epigraph in Pinker's book comes from a Bob Mankoff cartoon: Cave woman says to cave man, "Yes, life is nasty, brutish, and short, but you knew that when you became cave man."
BY SYMONS

Memo to cartoonists: Try to make it look like an accident, maybe Mankoff won't catch it.
BY CROSSPALMS

Remember, to have the e-mail version of Bob's blogpost arrive in your mailbox every Wednesday -- for free! -- just sign up on the magazine's website home page; scroll down a little and look on the right side for the "NEWSLETTERS" tab.

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