How About Never – Is Never Good For You?: My Life in Cartoons
The New Yorker receives around 1,000 cartoons each week; it only publishes ~17 of them. The magazine’s longstanding cartoon editor and self-proclaimed “humor analyst” dissects the comedy within just some of the “idea drawings” featured in the magazine, explaining what works, what doesn’t, and why. 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. More than memoir, though; it’s also an enormous window into the mystery and alchemy behind the creation and selection of New Yorker cartoons. He’ll talk about the book with “a digression into humor theory and the possibilities for algorithmic humor creation and recognition.”
Speaker Details
Bob was close to earning a PhD in psychology when he finally admitted that cartooning was his true calling. He developed his distinctive “dot” style as a vehicle for his heady sense of humor, had his first cartoon published in the New Yorker in 1977, and has been serving as the magazine’s cartoon editor since 1997. He started The Cartoon Bank, a business devoted to licensing cartoons for use in newsletters, textbooks, magazines, and other media. He has edited multiple volumes of cartoon collections, including “The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker.” Lectured on humor at the University of Michigan. More than nine hundred of his cartoons have been published in The New Yorker, including one of the most popular New Yorker cartoons of all time, which gave the title to this memoir.
- Date:
- Speakers:
- Bob Mankoff
- Affiliation:
- New Yorker Magazine
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Jeff Running
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