Funny business

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

"We worked for hours on this during the practice debates," said the campaign manager Matt Rhoades. "We were, like, 'Mitt, if you find yourself on the verge of saying something true, bite your tongue.'" . . . While Mr. Romney's talent for lying was in evidence during the Republican primary debates, it was nothing like the "mad skills" he displayed Wednesday night, the campaign manager said.

-- The Borowitz Report for today,
"Debate Victory Validates Romney Strategy of Nonstop Lying"

by Ken

The cartoon above is the "luscious" Peter Steiner cartoon with which I intended to lead of what was intended to be last night's post, before I felt obliged to push all matters but those of The Debate to the side ("Are the debates rigged? Sure, but they're rigged jointly by the two campaigns").

We'll come back to Peter Steiner, the creator of 421 published New Yorker cartoons who segued unexpectedly into novel-writing. Meanwhile I think we'll finish up the subject of The Debate with this latest Borowitz Report:

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) -- Taking a victory lap after their candidate's win in the first Presidential debate Wednesday night, Romney campaign insiders today attributed his success to his strategic use of relentless lying.

"We worked for hours on this during the practice debates," said the campaign manager Matt Rhoades. "We were, like, 'Mitt, if you find yourself on the verge of saying something true, bite your tongue.'"

Mr. Rhoades said that the nominee was allowed to say his real name and acknowledge that he used to be a Governor, "but other than that, he was on a very short leash, truth-wise."

While Mr. Romney's talent for lying was in evidence during the Republican primary debates, it was nothing like the "mad skills" he displayed Wednesday night, the campaign manager said.

"All the hard work and practice lying really paid off," Mr. Rhoades said. "Plus hanging out with Paul Ryan."

NOW BACK TO THE CARTOON

As veteran readers will have guessed, the Paul Steiner cartoon, originally published in the '90s, comes from New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's weekly e-newsletter-blogpost this week, "A Novel Idea."

"Being a cartoonist," Bob writes, "is a bit like being a writer of very, very short stories. The average cartoon caption is usually no longer than a sentence. And for many, a single word is word enough." And he offers three examples, with the captions "Curiosity" (by James Stevenson), "Gold!: (by Frank Modell), and "Well?" (by Dana Fradon).

Then Bob offers two of his favorite examples of the opposite genre, cartoons whose very point of their mock-novelistic verbosity, by Joe Mirachi and Jack Ziegler. And he tells us he knows that Ziegler (whose "first New Yorker cartoon" story Bob passed on in a February post that I wrote about at the time) "wrote at least one unpublished novel before he saw the light and became a cartoonist," and "perhaps that experience is what inspired these cartoons about the frustrations of the writing life":

"I feel that I have at least one more unpublished novel in me."

"Hey, I'm thirsty. I need a drink. A drink and a liverwurst sandwich. Hey, how about a sandwich and a beer down at Gallagher's, and then we can go shoot some pool? Or maybe take in a movie. Hey, I'm talking to you."

"In Jack's case," Bob writes, "literature's loss was cartooning's gain." Which brings him to the saga of Peter Steiner, "whose place in the cartooning pantheon is forever secured by this panel" -- the one I've plunked atop this post.

Steiner migrated in the opposite direction, from cartoonist to novelist, and in this post Bob has him tell his own story, which begins:

Thirty-five years ago, I set out to become a cartoonist, which, in those days, meant turning out an endless stream of cartoon ideas and sending them off in the mail week after week to various magazines, most of which no longer exist. It was, as I look back on it now, a ridiculous discipline -- making funny drawings that no one would ever see. Eventually, though, a small percentage got bought and published and even laughed at.

Making a cartoon was always mostly writing. You're composing a little one-act play, so the language has to be just right. Of course, some cartoons don't have captions, but they still have characters and a sort of unspoken dialogue. Captions have to be extremely economical, as concise as they can be without jeopardizing the rhythm by which the cartoon reveals its humor. "Tell me, Miss Moneypenny…" and so on. The drawing may be the fulfillment of the cartoon, but the writing is its essence.

I became a novelist in the nineties, some twenty years after becoming a cartoonist. But while becoming a cartoonist had been my whole purpose back then, becoming a novelist happened almost by accident.

I'm not going to spoil his story further (it's a fascinating -- and not at all funny -- one), but will simply jump to his summing up:

I have found writing to be so amusing and pleasurable that I have written one novel after another. Those that were published have gotten good reviews and have been commercial failures. My fourth novel, "The Resistance," which is about the French Resistance during the Second World War, has just been published and will, I expect, suffer the same fate. It doesn't really matter. Like cartooning, it is, in the grand scheme of things, a ridiculous discipline. But it is one that I love.

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