DownWithTyranny!: Bob Mankoff announces a "memoir in cartoons" titled after his famous cartoon caption "How About Never -- Is Never Good for You?" *

(Plus he talks about his recent SXSW presentation)

Memoir in cartoons by the longtime
cartoon editor of The New Yorker

People tell Bob Mankoff that as the cartoon editor of The New Yorker he has the best job in the world. Never one to beat around the bush, he explains to us, in the opening of this singular, delightfully eccentric book, that because he is also a cartoonist at the magazine he actually has two of the best jobs in the world. With the help of myriad images and his funniest, most beloved cartoons, he traces his love of the craft all the way back to his childhood, when he started doing funny drawings at the age of eight. After meeting his mother, we follow his unlikely stints as a high-school basketball star, draft dodger, and sociology grad student. Though Mankoff abandoned the study of psychology in the seventies to become a cartoonist, he recently realized that the field he abandoned could help him better understand the field he was in, and here he takes up the psychology of cartooning, analyzing why some cartoons make us laugh and others don't. He allows us into the hallowed halls of The New Yorker to show us the soup-to-nuts process of cartoon creation, giving us a detailed look not only at his own work, but that of the other talented cartoonists who keep us laughing week after week. For desert, he reveals the secrets to winning the magazine's caption contest. Throughout How About Never -- Is Never Good for You?, we see his commitment to the motto "Anything worth saying is worth saying funny."

-- book description from amazon.com

"It wasn’t that people generally didn’t enjoy the presentation. Except for the few who threw fruit, I think that most did. It was that the material that had produced belly laughs [at his TED Talk version -- see below] now resulted in chuckles, and chuckles became smiles, and the smiles got polite."

-- Bob Mankoff, on his recent appearance at SXSW

by Ken

And of how many people can it be said, I ask you, that he or she "abandoned the study of psychology in the seventies to become a cartoonist"? I don't mean just in the '70s, but in any decade at all? Since our pal Bob Mankoff (disclosure: no, there has never been any communication of any kind between us; I just think of him as a pal is all) has unintentionally provided us with so many breaking updates from the world of New Yorker cartooning, I thought the least we could do was to pass along the more personal news of his own book publication. Are you going to tell me that you have no curiosity about the lifetime remembrances of a person who abandoned the study of psychology to become a cartoonist?

In this week's e-newsletter-slash-blogpost, "Fancy Talk," Bob -- before getting around to the book plug -- tells us about his adventures at SXSW (the South by Southwest annual conference in Austin), including an apparently highly successful appearance on TBS's on-location-in-Austin Pete Holmes Show and a less clamorously successful appearance in the form of his own SXSW presentation. He explains that the material for his presentation was "largely identical" to a much happier version he gave as a TED Talk, which he says is "probably the best talk that I ever gave":

"Why it was the best," says Bob, "had only partly to do with me."

Yes, the "comedic information" -- i.e., the actual jokes and cartoons -- were quite good. But they were greatly enhanced by the three dynamite presentations that came before mine, which warmed up the crowd. And that was a crowd of maybe a hundred and fifty people packed closely together.

No one was more than fifty feet from the stage. Everyone was close enough to see the cartoons on the slides and to read the captions. The proximity of the crowd enabled me to feed off its energy and to channel all of that energy into laughter, which, in such a tightly packed situation, is highly contagious.

For the SXSW presentation, much of my material was identical. But the outcome was quite different. It wasn't that people generally didn't enjoy the presentation. Except for the few who threw fruit, I think that most did. It was that the material that had produced belly laughs now resulted in chuckles, and chuckles became smiles, and the smiles got polite.

In contrast to the intimate, humor-inducing TED setting, the venue for my talk at SXSW was an immense, thousand-seat ballroom that looked something like this:

Actually, too much like this, because although the event was fairly well attended, with maybe two hundred and fifty people, the opposite effect was created by the empty seats. All seven hundred and fifty of them were a mute testimony to the people who preferred some other event to mine. As a result, I came close to preferring some other event to mine.

To compound the problem, the two hundred and fifty or so attendees were somewhat scattered within the immensity of the ballroom, making the contagion of any laughter hard to spread. Plus, many people were so far from the stage that they couldn't possibly read the cartoon captions on the slides on the too-small monitors.

But, like they say, the show must go on, so I asked the person in charge of the event to get started, and to have the person who was going to introduce me introduce me. It turned out that no one was introducing me. "You introduce yourself!" she said, making it sound like a good thing, a cool thing, an awesome Austin, SXSW thing. I had my doubts.

I tried to allay them by conferring with the tech person, at least to make sure that the slides containing video and audio would work flawlessly. He said, "I hope so. I just started this job yesterday." Suffice it to say, they didn't. But the show did go on, and it was far from a total loss. I learned a lot more from it than from any of my successful presentations, and some of that thrown fruit was delicious.

"That's enough of wearing the hair shirt for one post," says Bob. "And now a heads up to all fans of 60 Minutes and New Yorker cartoons."

60 Minutes was launched in 1968. My back-of-the-envelope calculation, which is certainly wrong but not crazily wrong, estimates that, since then, more than a hundred and forty-three thousand minutes of 60 Minutes have tick-tocked their way through the events that have altered and illuminated our times. I like to think that New Yorker cartoons and cartoonists belong in that pantheon, but, alas, until now, not one of those more than a hundred and forty-three thousands minutes has been devoted to them. By "now," I mean Sunday at 7 P.M. So watch or set your TiVo or DVR. But, please, no throwing fruit.

P.S. Hey, I almost forgot that my memoir, How About Never—Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons, is hot off the presses, and being coolly delivered to Kindles, iPads, Google Tablets, and other sleek slabs of connected infotainment.

* THE FAMOUS CARTOON CAPTION