Why are cartoonists fighting to break America down?

“Cartoons are like gossamers and you don’t dissect gossamers. This is what Mr. Elinoff, the fictional cartoon editor of the New Yorker in an episode of Seinfeld, trying to explain a cartoon to Elaine. Elaine is not satisfied. Mr. Elinoff suggests that the cartoon is a commentary on contemporary manners, a slice of life, or even a play on words. “You have no idea what that means, do you?” Elaine said. “No,” he concedes.

The scene sums up the problem of understanding the New YorkerHis sometimes oblique sense of humor – and can be a relief to the many British cartoonists who have tried and failed to enter the literary stronghold of the Big Apple. It’s reassuring to think that even funny Americans like Seinfeld can be baffled by New Yorker jokes. Yet the mystic survives, and most British cartoonists have tried to get into the magazine, drawn to its great comic book history (James Thurber, Saul Steinberg, Charles Addams) and the money: it pays more than ten. times more for a cartoon than British magazines.

Former (real) cartoon editor Bob Mankoff said in a Ted Talk: New Yorker occupies a very different space. It’s a playful space in its own way, but also voluntary, and in this space, the cartoons are different … New Yorker humor is self-reflective. Elsewhere, he recalled that when he was finally awarded a contract in 1980, the contract did not refer to cartoons but to “idea drawings”, what Mankoff calls the “sine qua non de New Yorker cartoons’: a drawing that asks both the cartoonist and the reader to reflect. Indeed, there’s a Sam Gross cartoon of a landscape with a big sign that says’ STOP AND THINK ‘and a man saying,’ It kind of makes you stop and think, doesn’t it? “

So New Yorker the gags are more philosophical than their British counterparts. Here, practically anything goes – sick jokes, crude jokes, badly drawn jokes, puns. The New Yorker has a metropolitan disdain for rawness and avoids puns. We feel that if obscene humor and puns were good enough for Shakespeare, they are for us.

New Yorker cartoons also tend to be more lifestyle-oriented and inhabit a more whimsical world of middle-class social gatherings, boardrooms, household relationships, and navel neuroses. Some recent ones look like architectural drawings, while British cartoons tend to inhabit a more traditional landscape: big noses, goofy expressions, surreal situations.

Humor is, of course, serious business, and from the start no one took it more seriously than the New Yorker. Its legendary founding editor, Harold Ross, was obsessed with perfection and detail. Thurber recounted how Ross studied a cartoon of a Ford Model T on a dusty road and asked, “Better dust!” He also looked for hidden phallic symbols and sent a photographer to the United Nations building to check if a drawing of his windows was accurate. Cartoons that fell below his standards would receive a “Get him out of here!” ”

Today, aspirant New Yorker cartoonists only have to endure months of silence once their ideas are submitted. Success is greeted with a sober “OK” from cartoon editor Emma Allen. Will McPhail and Carol Isaacs (who draws under the pseudonym The Surreal McCoy) are two British cartoonists who have been so successful – following a few British predecessors such as Ronald Searle, HM Bateman and Heath Robinson. Both are adamant that the work they are submitting for the New Yorker is essentially no different from that published in UK magazines.

“My approach is more or less the same for both sides of the pond,” says Isaacs. “Maybe polish up grammar and spelling for Americans. I like Seinfeld and the Marx Brothers as much as I love Spike Milligan and Fawlty towers. As they say there, will understand.

McPhail believes the recent trend towards more absurd and bizarre cartoons in the magazine has helped his cause. “It’s the cartoons that really make me laugh, the ones where I don’t know why it’s funny. I’ve always seen a lot of humor in British cartoons like math equations. They’re perfectly balanced, and whatever is set up at the start of the equation works fine at the end. But I like cartoons where you don’t see ‘the strings’, if that makes sense.’

Is familiarity with New York essential to inhabiting the New Yorkermentality? Isaacs doesn’t think so. “After all,” she said, “there are many New Yorker cartoonists who have never set foot in New York. Their sense of humor is perhaps more about the absurd than anything else – and it knows no boundaries.

McPhail confesses that he used to make pilgrimages to New Yorker offices just to submit in person to Bob Mankoff. “Of course I pretended to be in New York at the time. So I think there are a number of them that need to know you’re serious about this before you post, like “Wow he came this far to get rejected in person!” ‘

Each week, thousands of submissions amount to about fifty acceptances. The closest to me to make the note is when I saw a cartoon identical to the one I once drew for Private detective (of a drunken ventriloquist in the gutter whose mannequin vomits) on the cover of a book titled The Rejection Collection: the cartoons you’ve never seen and will never see in the New Yorker.