The cartoons in the New Yorker magazine hold a special place in the world of cartooning. The man largely responsible for what cartoons get in and what don't is Bob Mankoff. NY1's Budd Mishkin filed the following One on 1 profile.
Bob Mankoff has a job that often stops others from doing theirs. Including, once, a cardiologist.
"Hooked up to the machines and everything, and I said, 'Oh, I’m the cartoon editor of New Yorker magazine.' He shuts off all the machines. He tells me, 'I have an idea for a cartoon.' And I say, 'Great. I got an idea for a bypass,'" Mankoff says.
It's a job that comes with built-in punch lines.
"In a plane or economy seating or something, and I’m supposed to go on last, I just push people out of the way, say, 'Excuse me, I’m cartoon editor of the New Yorker magazine. I have some very important jokes to do,'" he jokes.
This is a busy time for Bob Mankoff. He’s featured in an HBO documentary, "Very Semi-Serious: A Partially Thorough Portrait of New Yorker Cartoonists." And he's still promoting his 2014 memoir, its title drawn from perhaps his most famous cartoon: "No, Thursday's Out. How about Never? Is Never Good for You?"
"That gets ripped off all the time," Mankoff says.
"Right now, I don't get any money. You can get it on t-shirts, and you can also get it on a thong."
On a thong?
"Yes,' Mankoff laughs. "It says, "How about never? Is never good for you?"
He's an influential arbiter of humor. For Mankoff, analyzing what's funny is serious business.
"A lot of just being funny is just being allowed temporarily to dip your toe into antisocial behavior, even though actually, you’re not really behaving that way," he says.
Every week, cartoonists come into Bob Mankoff's office to pitch their work. Cartoons come in the mail as well.
The numbers are staggering. Mankoff gets about 1,000 cartoon submissions for the New Yorker every week. About 17 make it in. Seventeen out of 1,000.
Is there a way to get accustomed to almost always saying no? Is that a learned trait?
"You don't think you're saying no. I mean, what you're doing is looking for yes," Mankoff says.
An in-house video called "Being Bob" parodied Mankoff's status as Mr. No.
Then, there's the key to all comedy: timing. We interviewed Mankoff in the week after the terrorist attacks in Paris.
"If I showed you the cartoon French Army Knife, and it has all corkscrews, OK, well, there, you’d laugh at that," Mankoff says. "But now, just because you’re thinking of the French and you’re very empathetic in every way, it won’t be funny to you."
This conundrum - when is it OK to be funny again - was most pronounced for the New Yorker after the September 11th attacks. The first New Yorker after 9/11 had no cartoons. The next edition started with a caption and cartoon by Leo Cullum: "I thought I'd never laugh again. Then I saw your jacket."
This notion of laughter through the tears was put to the test most personally for Mankoff in 2012, when his son committed suicide.
"We were making the movie at the time, Very Semi-Serious, and I was writing this book. Everything stopped," he says. "For us, of course, it was like 9/11. Nothing is funny then. Everything is horrible."
And yet, eventually, they had to laugh a little.
"I always could make my little daughter Sarah, who is going to be 25 now, laugh where I twitch my muscle, and she always thinks, 'Oh dad, that is so disgusting.' And we all laugh," Mankoff says. "In a little way, it's like that Leo Cullum cartoon, that if we are going to go on with our lives, we were actually going to have to live our lives and breathe and laugh."
Mankoff grew up on Teller Avenue in the Bronx near Claremont Park. He says his father had a sweet sense of humor, even in letters home to a complaining wife while he was serving in World War II.
"'I understand, Molly, everybody likes to get mail. I like to get mail. But we travel around a lot in the Army, you know,'" Mankoff reads.
He says his mother, to use an old New York expression, "had a mouth on her," even when she came to visit him at summer camp and he was being punished in his cabin.
"I was in pajamas, and she says, 'Why are you in pajamas? Why are you here?' I said, 'Well, I didn't make my bed, and the counselor...' She said, 'Where is he?'" Mankoff says. "She went over to him and she grabbed him (laughs). She said, 'You get him out there on the playing field or you're going to be in pajamas.'"
He liked drawing and comics and attended the High School of Music and Art, now LaGuardia. But in the early '70s, Mankoff was on a path to a PHD in psychology.
"When I told my father I was quitting and I was going to become a cartoonist, my father said, 'You know, they already have people who do that.' And I said, 'You know, one of them might die, and then I will be there,'" Mankoff says.
"I was a bad student and I didn't go to classes, and I was interested in psychology and philosophy, and for the rest of my life, I actually felt bad about that and sort of became an autodidact, where I always feel I have to learn things and make up for it."
He sold his first cartoon to the New Yorker in 1977 and soon became a regular contributor. In 1991, he started The Cartoon Bank, licensing cartoons for use in newsletters, textbooks, magazines, and other media.
Mankoff says he's been obsessive in these pursuits.
"The sacrifice was relationships," he says. "Now, I'm married three times. It just keeps getting better and better."
A clever cartoon can bring joy, but the life of a cartoonist can be stressful.
"I think the hardest thing in being a cartoonist is holding on to the success, which is dependent on idea after idea after idea," Mankoff says. "In other words, you can't coast. You have to do it every week."
Through the years, Mankoff has become less of a cartoonist and more of an editor and self-proclaimed evangelist for the New Yorker cartoons. But he still has his cartooning fastball.
"I did a cartoon a number of years ago where there's a woman at the bar saying, 'I hate to admit it, but a man with a big carbon footprint gets me hot,'" he says.
In his time, the magazine has moved its offices from Times Square to One World Trade Center, perhaps a metaphor. There's not much that's funny in the world right now, but there will always be the need to laugh.
"I don't think you can cope with tragedy completely unless you can find some little part of joy in your life that has to do with seeing the absurdity of it and laughing about it," Mankoff says.