Rotten Easter Egg

In another on-line forum this weekend, I egged on its readers to look for an "Easter egg" in last Thursday's cartoon; so in fairness, I feel obligated to reveal the answer this morning.

"This Is Her First Lynching" by Reginald Marsh in New Yorker, Sept. 8, 1934

The woman in the red hat in my cartoon could well be the daughter of the little girl in Reginald Marsh's 1934 cartoon.

As If Any of It Makes Sense

Someone started this thing today of recaptioning random New Yorker cartoons with this particular sentence, so here's my contribution.

In case you get all your news from Catholic News Service, the New Yorker suspended legal analyst talking head Jeffrey Toobin for masturbating during a Zoom call with other New Yorker staffers and a New York radio station. Nobody is quite sure what was so arousing about the election simulation that was the focus of the call, in which Toobin was supposed to represent the U.S. judicial system.

Perhaps he was fantasizing about Amy Coney Barrett.

Anyway, cartoonists joke about being able to replace the captions of New Yorker cartoons with random lines, "Christ, what an asshole" being the classic example.

My offering here would have worked better by putting the caption in the future tense, but that would be breaking the rules of the game.

But if you want to get all meta about it, James Stevenson drew this cartoon in 1968, when neither he nor his fortune teller would have had any clue what Jeffrey Toobin or Zoom calls are.

Melania's Turn of Phrase

Somebody had better warn Rudy Giuliani that the calls are coming from inside the Quicken Loans Center!

Divertimento

Earlier this month, the Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science -- whose acronym attests to their not being entirely or exclusively serious -- published a series of articles finding a lack of racial and gender diversity among New Yorker cartoons.

In the 47 issues we examined, we recorded 1,810 characters in 639 cartoons by 70 cartoonists. 94.7% of these characters were judged to be white (thus 5.3% were non-white), and 70.6% were judged to be male (29.4% female) (Table 1). For reference, about 72% of the US population is estimated to be white (this categorization includes Hispanics) and about 51% is estimated to be female. ...

This problem of underrepresentation of minorities and females should be an easy fix. Cartoonists can simply draw more female and minority characters. This would amount to more than just pandering. ... For his part, Robert Mankoff can also begin to encourage cartoons featuring more women and minority characters.

I'm not a New Yorker cartoonist, and I do try to diversify the people in my work, but doing so can occasionally distract from the joke. Take for example, the two white guys in this 2001 cartoon:

The boys in this cartoon represent a certain "gay clone" prevalent at the time. There have been certain stereotypical types of lesbian or non-white characters that I could have drawn instead, but I think I would have been accused of being mean-spirited if I had.

The PNIS study (I warned you about the acronym) notes that female cartoonists tend to draw more cartoons about females than male cartoonists do. I would note that female New Yorker cartoonists also tend to draw more autobiographical cartoons than male New Yorker cartoonists do. Still, Roz Chast, for example, is less likely to be accused of sexism if she draws a cartoon in which a female character appears in a not-so-flattering situation than if, say, Christopher Weyant drew the same cartoon.

Sexism and racism aside, there are other considerations when casting the characters in a cartoon. Crowden Satz, a contributor to the Wall Street Journal and other publications, took issue with the PNIS study in a Facebook post today.

For humor to exist, the reader's brain has to be, very quickly, jarred out of its rest position. Setup + unexpected twist = funny. So what happens if, in addition to the gag, the characters don't fit expectations in the setup? Such as, for instance, the overbearing executive is played by a slim woman rather than a big fat old white guy? Well, the humor train gets derailed. One's brain pauses to say to itself "Hey, look at that character. Why is there a slim woman yelling instead of an old guy? What's going on? Is she the boss or what?"

The third installment of the study examined this tendency of cartoonists to draw white males in certain professions (bosses, mobsters, doctors) and white women in others (secretaries, molls, nurses).

One of the professions included was "God," represented 100% of

the time in New Yorker cartoons as a white male. Here again, if a cartoonist tries to break stereotype, the reader is apt to be confused -- unless it is the point of the cartoon, such as the 1975 Bill Plympton cartoon for the Soho Weekly News at right, which depicted Alabama Governor George Wallace, paralyzed in a 1972 assassination attempt, rising from his wheelchair and praising the Lord for the miracle.

Divorced from this context, the reader might be left thinking that maybe the cartoon was about one of the Supremes having just died.

One could, I suppose, draw Morgan Freeman in the role of God; but he's played other characters in the movies, too, including some decidedly unholy men that the reader might have seen on screen more recently than the Bruce/Evan Almighty flicks.

Still, it might work, if every cartoonist in the country were to agree that cartoon God would henceforth always be Morgan Freeman.