danny6114: From the Desk of Bob Mankoff - December 5, 2012, Dog Cartoons scroll down

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Dear Laughter Lovers,

Do you know someone who adores dogs? Silly question. Even if you yourself are not a member of the Church of Canis Lupus Familiaris, you probably know many congregants. So, hallelujah and amen! “The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs” is available at fine bookstores everywhere. Go and get one. They’re going fast.

I feel certain that even the most dognostic among you, who are ready to scoff at the church of the dog, will stay to pray if you read this good book. It’s wonderfully worthy of man’s most loyal companion, as well as the women and kids to whom he’s equally devoted. You’ll find many great essays, articles, and stories packed in these three hundred and eighty-four pages, and, of course, lots of cartoons.

How could there not be? Man’s best friend is also the cartoonist’s favorite animal.

The dog’s classic cartoon antagonist, the cat, runs a rather distant second.

Despite the preponderance of dog cartoons, there have been more New Yorker cat-cartoon books than dog ones.

For dog lovers, we hope the seventy-six cartoons in the new book redresses that imbalance. Not that there’s anything wrong with cat-cartoon books, or cats themselves, although you would definitely get into an argument with our dogs on this subject.

“Bums” not for their antipathy toward dogs but for their lack of empathy for that paragon of animals: us.

The problem with cats, of course, is this:

They have an agenda that rarely matches our own.

Not so for Fido. Cat aloofness is alien to dogkind. Their transparent emotions make them both lovable and comical.

The philosopher Henri Bergson wrote in his book “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic” that “the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression.” That’s why these photos are funny:

The genius of the George Booth cover (above) is that even the back of a Booth dog, within the context of patient persistent longing, is humanly expressive. Turn him around and there’s attitude aplenty, although that attitude can be quite different.

In “The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs,” Adam Gopnik has a delightful essay called “Dog Story,” in which he writes, “Dogs have little imagination about us and our inner lives but limitless intuition about them; we have false intuitions about their inner lives but limitless imagination about them. Our relationship meets in the middle.”

And try as we might, our relationship is fraught with misunderstanding.

The earliest dog cartoons that appeared in The New Yorker, in the nineteen-twenties, searched for the shared mental space between dogs and people by projecting personhood on the dogs, who are drawn realistically, and are still obviously real dogs.

In his essay, Adam goes on to say, “We, creatures of language who organize our experience in abstract concepts, can’t imagine what it’s like to be in the head of a being that has no language. To have the experiences while retaining our memory of humanness would make us a human in a dog suit, not a dog.” Which suits cartoonists perfectly fine.

Cartoonists also imaginatively expand the dog-people overlap by putting dogs in human suits.

Dogs, it turns out, have no trouble at all organizing their experiences into abstract concepts with the benefit of language, especially when it comes to dissing cats.

And succeed they have, but cat lovers should not despair. This year, dogs are having their day, but next holiday season, the good folks at Random House tell me, the tables will be turned.