Here's a worthy use for all of my newly acquired free time and chemo-diminished energy: friends last night brought me a 655-page, coffee-table sized book of thousands of New Yorker cartoons published between its founding in 1925 and 2004. Also included are two CDs containing all 68,647 cartoons published in the mag during those years.
I have a way to go, but I have already gotten through a few hundred of them.
The New Yorker is a heavy-duty, serious publication, with long stories just last week on the pitfalls of using drone aircraft against the Taliban, Australian wildfires and movie director James Cameron. The leavening effect of the cartoons is essential to its readership (or at least to me).
Most people freely admit to reading the cartoons first, especially the contest at the back of the book, where readers' ideas for captions are ranked.
(Winner last week: guy is walking into a bar with no pants on but a duck on his head. "Don't worry, he's covered by Aflac,'' another patron says. I have never had a worthy idea in this contest).
The cartoons in the book are arranged chronologically and so provide interesting glimpses of history: in the '20s, for example (as far as I've gotten) there are cartoons about solving the new problem of parking by making triangle-shaped cars or putting them on apartment-building terraces via cranes; and people living near the top floor of newly built skycrapers complaining about sidewalks not being swept.
Most are kind of snotty, of course - an Ivy League football team calling a play to commence when the QB utters the date of the poet Shelly's birth - while others are just hilarious, like the one of a skier whose tracks seem to have taken him straight through a tree.
I can't wait to find out what people thought was funny during the Depression and World War II.
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New Yorker cartoons? Pretty good stuff, but no Hy Rosen.... I hope you are planning lots of bike trips, my man. We're all eagerly anticipating the interview with Dr. Chartock, and in your honor will making a drinking game out of it. We'll do a shot every time you guys use the word ``I.'' The copy should really flow well that afternoon.
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