There is a changing of the guard at The New Yorker. Cartoon editor Robert Mankoff, who has sifted through about 1,500 submitted cartoons a week for 20 years, is stepping down. His successor is a 29-year-old editor and staff writer named Emma Allen, who has been taking care of the "Daily Shouts" humour section and writing about fashion and food and the kind of flash-in-the pan trend that can only be found in the metropolis (a shooting range for artists, for example). In other words, perfect cartoon material.
Cartoon fanatics are apprehensive: She's a wry and subtle writer, specializing in urban culture, so she will be familiar with all the pretensions that New Yorker cartoons love to mock – all those jaded sophisticates taking the latest trends to surreal extremes – but she isn't a cartoonist herself. Can it be done?
She may be a bit apprehensive about the role herself, as she didn't even want to be interviewed about it. (She says she will do interviews once she has been in the job a while.) So I can't tell you what her plans are, or if we will see a shift in tone. I can tell you she has some pretty big shoes to fill.
Robert Mankoff had become that rare thing: a celebrity New Yorker editor.
Mankoff had become that rare thing: a celebrity New Yorker editor. (This is rare because The New Yorker is secretive: they don't even publish a masthead.) He wrote a column about cartoons. He has had a documentary film made about him. He is a reporter's dream: affable, funny, sensitive, and with a New York boroughs accent that seems straight out of the Cold War.
And of course, he drew some of the funniest New Yorker cartoons in history. You've seen many of them without knowing it. The lemmings jumping off a cliff and going upward to heaven – the caption says "What lemmings believe." The woman who says to her husband, "I'm sorry dear, I wasn't listening. Can you repeat everything you've said since we've been married?"
Everyone knows his most famous one. Trying to arrange a time for an interview with him, I could barely restrain myself from saying: "How about never? Is never good for you?"
Satire has always been written from an insider’s vantage point.
That one is the perfect New Yorker cartoon: a satire of contemporary pressures, with a dark undertone to it. I grew up reading The New Yorker in provincial Canada and gained the impression from these drawings that a barely suppressed hysteria was the prime feature of life in that city, as if each of their long-faced characters – so often in restaurants, as if they lived there! – were about to disintegrate completely from stress and competition.
And this was of course glamorous: It made me want to go there, to be one of them.
Mankoff, on the phone from New York, says he felt the same growing up in Queens. "I aspired to it. New York was this fantastic looking place. We would travel over the bridge to Manhattan, this amazing fantasyland, with skyscrapers, the Empire State building. You'd have to get dressed up to go to the city. Now I work at Times Square.
The most fascinating New Yorker cartoons are indeed satire: they exaggerate social and political preoccupations until they are surreal.
"I'm a city bumpkin. It's a retro idea, the city as aspirational: to believe that there are people there who are more educated than me, better than me. I wanted to be like them."
And to make fun of them too, I guess – which is how satire has always been written; from an insider's vantage point. The most fascinating New Yorker cartoons are indeed satire: they exaggerate social and political preoccupations until they are surreal. They are mocking and loving at the same time. "They are not hectoring," Mankoff agrees. "They are pointing out that we spend most of our lives finding unhappiness in very comfortable situations. One of my favourites is the one by Bruce Kaplan, who goes by BEK, that shows a woman in a restaurant, complaining something like, 'there's something wrong with this that only I would recognize.'"
Mankoff is wary of thinking of cartoons as a powerful political force. "The real enemies you have they're not going to be affected by satire. Your troops don't go into battle thinking: 'Oh, we forgot to pack our satire.'"
Robert Mankoff once wrote, about explaining cartoons: “It’s like gossamer, and one doesn’t dissect gossamer.”
I ask him if cartoons were likely to become more overtly political in times of political difference. He laughs. "In the Trump era, you can't avoid it. He's the elephant in the joke writers' room. In a way, that distorts things: Everything becomes seen through this. But I'll let [editor-in-chief] David Remnick and his writing colleagues deal with Trump."
He also won't be pinned down on what exactly makes a cartoon funny. He once wrote, about explaining cartoons: "It's like gossamer, and one doesn't dissect gossamer."
He has been praised for bringing more female cartoonists into the magazine's fold, but he is modest about this. There are many more female contributors to the magazine generally, he demurs. Under Remnick there has been a greater interest in diversity.
Robert Mankoff is wary of thinking of cartoons as a powerful political force.
I press him to say if he sees any difference between male and female cartooning styles. "Women tend to deal more with reality. They live less in cartoon land. They're not going to do so many desert island cartoons. Men are more likely to engage in the cartoon equivalent of knock-knock jokes – they devolve into a hermetic joke world."
I suspect there is so much respect for the tradition of subtlety that Mankoff has encouraged that Emma Allen won't change much as she takes over. For a while in the 1980s and 90s people complained the New Yorker cartoons weren't funny any more. I think what they really meant was that they weren't politically pointed enough; they had devolved, as Mankoff says, into self commentary (the endless variations on desert island, couple in bed, drunk in bar, panhandler with funny sign, king in castle, creature evolving from water onto beach.), a meta-world more surreal than real. It will be difficult, in an age of political agitation and anger, to keep them real and yet stop from from shifting cartooning into full-on didacticism.
The grown-up cartoon is where we find irony and whimsy and the lampooning of the everyday – the ephemeral as much as the geopolitical. Long may it be slight.