Ready for New Year's Eve? We've got the "New Yorker" cartoon crew to help get you psyched

"Just one more holiday to hit us upside our heads," says New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff in his latest e-newsletter/blogpost, "New Year, Old Laughs" -- more of this post in a moment. (Click on this cartoon and most of our others in this post to enlarge.)

by Ken

It's hard to ramp up to the appropriate level of festivity with this smack-dab midweek New Year's, especially if you're expected to be at your work station until today's closing whistle sounds. (Let's just say that I was at my desk until that whistle.) So I thought we could all use some professional inspiritization. So we're calling on some of the most dependable merry-makers, the corps of New Yorker cartoonists, as refereed by cartoon editor Bob Mankoff.

When we rejoin Bob in a moment, we're going to find him sneaking his way, not entirely surprisingly, toward a slide show, and here I have to enter a disclaimer. This is, I think, the best slide show I have ever seen Bob post. There are nine cartoons in it, and I think they're all gems. I made an executive decision that we're going to pluck out three, with possibly a fourth for another use I have in mind -- but believe me, the choice was excruciating.

Now let's rejoin Bob, having announced that we have "just one more holiday to hit us upside our heads."

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And then the whole damn merry-go-round starts to go round again.

"The seasons fly by so fast, don't they?"

This last holiday is a tricky one to navigate, with its injunction for fun fueled by inebriation:



And its aftermath leaves us resolved to do better and be better, with the predictable results.



The takeaway is not to bite off more than you can eschew.

Still, as we slide into 2014, it would be a sin to abstain from all fun, so perhaps it’s not a bad idea to resolve to view this slide show of some of the magazine’s favorite New Year’s cartoons. We won’t judge.

"Now we'll need a sitter for New Year's Eve."

"Nope, no New Year's resolutions for me this year --
I'm still working on a backlog dating from '87."

"Ernest, it's bedtime. The party's over."

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