danny6114

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

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

If you are unable to see the message below, click here to view.

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.

Cheers,

Entries accepted through December 9th.

ENTER OR VOTE

Order your New Yorker Desk Diary today!

SHOP

Did you know that you can license cartoons for professional use?

BROWSE CARTOONS

A slide show from the current issue.

WATCH

UNSUBSCRIBE | VIEW OUR USER AGREEMENT | VIEW OUR PRIVACY POLICY

Posted via email from danny6114's Pre- posterous

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

From the Desk of Bob Mankoff - November 28, 2012, Lincoln's Humor

From: New Yorker

Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 4:06 PM

Subject: From the Desk of Bob Mankoff - November 28, 2012

If you are unable to see the message below, click here to view.

Dear Laughter Lovers,

Something that has always intrigued me about Abraham Lincoln is, not surprisingly, his sense of humor. As far as I can tell, he’s the first American President to have one.

That’s because the term “sense of humor” really wasn’t in common usage until the eighteen-sixties and seventies. In the eighteen-forties and fifties, it was called “the sense of the ridiculous,” and didn’t have the positive connotations that “sense of humor” has today. Back then, what was ridiculous was what invited ridicule. Funniness and cruelty went hand in hand. Of course, they still do a lot of arm-in-arm strolling in our day as well.

In the movie “Lincoln,” Tommy Lee Jones, as the sarcastically vilifying Thaddeus Stevens, exemplifies the funny-cruel connection. Many of his vilifications were too nasty for the Congressional Globe (predecessor of the Congressional Record), but this one was recorded: “There was a gentleman from the far West sitting next to me, but he went away and the seat seems just as clean as it was before.”

Lincoln’s humor was very different because, for one thing, it was actually “humor” as the word was defined in his time. We don’t make the distinction between “wit” and “humor” anymore, but in the nineteenth century people did. Wit was sarcastic and antipathetic while humor was congenial and empathetic. It’s the difference we note now when we distinguish between “laughing with” and “laughing at.” Lincoln was much more about “laughing with” than “laughing at.” And when “laughing at,” it was often himself he was mocking.

In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, when Douglas accused Lincoln of being two-faced, Lincoln replied, referencing his homeliness, “Honestly, if I were two-faced, would I be showing you this one?” And, in a way, Lincoln’s face itself tells us much about his sense of humor.

You can comb through thousands of photographs of politicians, soldiers, and the like from Lincoln’s time and not find a single smile. Here’s his sourpussed cabinet:

True, the extended exposures required for photographs of that era made smiling difficult. Yet Lincoln alone, as far as I can tell, overcame that difficulty. And though there is only a hint of smile in his photographs, it hints at what Lincoln knew too well: that, as Mark Twain pointed out, “the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow.”

Interestingly, while having a sense of humor, or at least the appearance of one provided by comedy writers, has become a necessary characteristic for an American President in our time, in the nineteenth century, too much humor was considered a liability. And that was the case for Lincoln. A journalist covering the Lincoln-Douglas debates commented that “I could not take a real personal liking to the man, owing to an inborn weakness for which he was even then notorious and so remained during his great public career, he was inordinately fond of jokes, anecdotes, and stories.”

So here’s hoping that he would be inordinately fond of some of these New Yorker cartoons about him. Or at least smile upon them.