Book-A-Day 2018 #138: I Only Read It for the Cartoons by Richard Gehr

There are of course two schools of thought on New Yorker cartoons. Some people love them and think they're the epitome of wit and humor in the modern era, the product of the clearly top market after a century of increasing sophistication in single-panel cartoons. Others think they're dull and hermetic and stale, reworking the same few cliches over and over again for a self-selected and self-described "elite" audience but not speaking to most of the world or providing much actual humor.

I tend to fall into the first group, myself, but I can see the point of the second. Magazine cartooning used to be a lush, flourishing ecosystem, with junky dumb cartoons and sophisticated witty cartoons and specialized cartoons for housewives and businessmen and kids and midwesterners and fishermen and thousands of others -- but all of those venues either closed up entirely or stopped buying cartoons, leaving us with basically just The New Yorker and Playboy now. So we have cartoons about unhappy married couples in a room snarling at each other and horny men chasing showgirls, when we used to have much more.

Such is life.

Still, the New Yorker has an impressive stable of excellent cartoonists, and I do insist that at their best, they are very funny. Richard Gehr agrees, which is why he interviewed a dozen of those cartoonists for his 2014 book I Only Read It for the Cartoons.

Those twelve cartoonists are: Lee Lorenz, Sam Gross, Roz Chast, George Booth, Edward Koren, Charles Barsotti, Arnie Levin, Victoria Roberts, Gahan Wilson, Jack Ziegler, Zachary Kanin, and then-cartoon editor Robert Mankoff. Each one gets a chapter of 15-20 pages, providing a magazine-profile style career overview and a small sampling of their work, mostly sketches and unpublished cartoons. (Each chapter also leads off with the cartoonist's favorite New Yorker cartoon of their own -- buit this isn't an art book; there are only three or four illustrations for each cartoonist.)

Reading Only Read It For the Cartoons straight through is like reading a dozen New Yorker profiles back-to-back, and cartoonists tend to have a similar shape to their lives as well. It's how I read this book, but I don't recommend it -- spacing things out will keep them from blurring together. Each profile is just fine by itself, but cartoonists are people who sit in a room and think up funny stuff for hours on end, so their lives are not often conventionally exciting.

It's still a fine book, and a good snapshot of the top of the gag-cartooning world in the early 21st century. Sure, that field is much smaller than it used to be, but that doesn't mean it can't still have some exciting peaks. It does, and these are (some of) them.