Evil, cruelty, lying and the imagination to strike unexpectedly are not only the basics of every terrorist who dresses in his feet (and ends up in a balaclava) but also to make good jokes. Or so maintains Robert Mankoff, cartoonist and editor of ‘The New Yorker’ for two decades, where he finally managed to publish after two years by sending ten weekly cartoons without response from “the Bible of cartoons.” Now, already as a myth, he reveals in a book recently published in Spain, ‘The Humor of New York’ (Bruguera), how creativity works and what the mechanisms of chaos are to create laughter. «The cartoon was chosen at a meeting of art by ‘The New Yorker’ editor William Shawn and cartoon editor Lee Lorenz, both now deceased, so the definitive answer went with them to the grave. Maybe it was the cumulative effect over the years that hypnotized them until they finally gave in,” Mankoff responds about why that first cartoon in particular after two years of ‘ghosting’. Weren’t you afraid of looking crazy? «I accepted it, although above all the danger was for my mental health. However, I don’t think that my obsession with becoming a cartoonist for ‘The New Yorker’ has made me crazier than I already was, because I was already crazy enough.” Related News standard Yes The life lesson that a MET security guard learned among masterpieces In ‘All the Beauty in the World’In this book, originally published more than 20 years ago, Mankoff sets out to unravel and show what the creative process is that leads to making a funny cartoon, shedding light on the mystery even for those own cartoonists. And some, in fact, prefer to keep it that way, just in case they “figure out how they do what they do and stop doing it.” The classic fear of paralysis from overanalyzing. However, this is not your case. The reason? “I’m Jewish, analyzing things is part of my nature.” And why do Jews love analysis so much? “Psychoanalysis,” he responds laconically. Having just passed the age of 80, Mankoff’s vital adventures in his formative stages went around, not circularly but rather on the back of a fly, to not even remember well how he went from wanting to be a social worker. and then teach speed reading techniques and end up on the verge of obtaining a doctorate in experimental psychology in the middle of the Vietnam War due to the fear of death and abandoning it to be a cartoonist! “It was a disappointment to my parents until I managed to become successful, which made them happy, but no matter how successful I was, they always secretly doubted that I was really making a living from cartoons and asked me if I needed money.”80,000 cartoons’ The New Yorker’ has published more than 80,000 cartoons since it began publication in 1925, almost 100 years ago, a comic history of the world, with big names like Lee Lorenz as head of art and cartoons, before our interviewee arrived, and now Emma Allen, who in 2017, at the age of 29, became the first woman and the youngest cartoon editor to ever have a magazine “which is to cartoons what God is to religion,” in Mankoff’s words: “ It’s a bit of an exaggeration, there are other magazines on par with ‘The New Yorker’, but I can’t think of any right now,” says Joker. In 1993, Mankoff produced his most popular piece, which has been published and cited thousands of times and even is part of ‘The Yale Book of Quotations’, and in which we see an executive say on the phone: «No, impossible Thursday. What do you think of never? Would it never go well for him? And here’s the crux of the matter, why does cruelty work so well in comedy? «Shakespeare said that “brevity is the soul of wit,” but I think hostility might be a better candidate. The whole genre of verbal wit is based on that. And what is satire but clever ridicule? Going back millennia before the Bardo, Aristotle defined wit as “polite insolence,” and Plato stated that laughter is a “mixture of pleasure and pain that lies in the malice of amusement.” In short, it’s more fun to throw a pie in someone’s face than to receive it yourself. In 2017, Mankoff gave up his crown and his kingdom, with an included documentary about himself, his labors and the 2015 department on HBO called Very Semi-Serious’, years that also coincide with the rise and consolidation of memes and TikTok in our era of social networks and new formats. Can cartoons remain obsolete against memes? «Maybe, a little, but this too will pass, and in a hundred years the cartoons of yesterday and today from ‘The New Yorker’ will still be funny, while the memes and tiktoks of today will be in the dustbin of the history of humor »Malice and liesApart from malice, lies are also another very useful weapon for creating humor… Even if it is in the magazine with the most famous verification department in the journalistic world. «In fact, ‘The New Yorker’ verified the data in the cartoons. “It was okay for a dog in a suit to ask for ‘a whiskey and toilet water’ in a bar, but if the buttons on a man’s jacket were on the wrong side, that needed to be corrected.” Oh, and another question: isn’t it too risky to say that painters, writers and scientists are not as creative as vignette artists? Maybe they don’t do it every day but… «Risky? That group doesn’t seem very rough, so I’m not worried about getting hit. I stand by my statement… unless they start to get stronger, then I will make a cowardly retreat. “And one last question: do we like to laugh more at ourselves or at others? And what does this tell us about humanity? «We like to laugh at others more, but if we only laugh at others, we are Donald Trump. This tells us that we are too human, which is fine, as long as it is not too often.
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