The New Yorker has published over seventy-five thousand cartoons since 1925, but only a few hundred cartoonists have been responsible for more ninety-five per cent of them. So, how does one become one of the few hundred?
Here’s my story, some of it factual and some of it fanciful but all of it truthiful, at least as I misremember it. I expect it will fill aspirants to the cartoon life with either deep despair or shallow hope, depending on whether they look at the glass as being ninety-nine per cent empty or one per cent full. Regardless, my hope is that at least one young person will read this and be prevented from becoming a doctor or a lawyer.
The secret of my success was whatever aptitude I had for cartooning, combined with my ineptitude for everything else. I had failed as a welfare worker (and became eligible for benefits myself), as a teacher of speed-reading at a Catholic high school, and as a doctoral candidate in behavioral psychology, employing the same strategy I had used with the Catholic girls:
This last failure deeply disappointed my mother, Mollie, who had hoped she could one day exclaim,
Her name being Mollie, I was hoping she could be mollified. I tried the tack that I was merely switching from one “ology” to another. Instead of being a psychologist I would be a cartoonologist. She remained unmollified, but said, in her heavily unaccented English, that whatever I wanted to be was fine with her, even if it were a garbage man-so long, she specified, as I was the best garbage man.
Her unaccent was so strong that at first I couldn’t understand, but eventually I convinced her that becoming a cartoonist was less of a long shot than being the top garbage man in a city with more than eleven thousand sanitation workers.
My father was a tougher case. He couldn’t be mollified, and Louified isn’t even a word. When he heard I wanted to be a cartoonist, he solemnly declared, “You know, they already have people who do that.”
He was right, of course. There were no signs in The New Yorker indicating a shortage of people who did that.
But, I pointed out, one of them might die.
Thankfully, that wasn’t necessary. All that would be required was to start failing again, twice as hard, but at something I loved.
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