Robert Mankoff Quotes

Humor of all types is notoriously subjective. That's true not only between different people but even within an individual at different times. This subjectivity is often masked when your in a group because laughter is contagious.

'The New Yorker' didn't invent the magazine cartoon, but it did really establish it.

There are no cartoons about happy marriages.

Cartoons are like fruit flies. Biologists use fruit flies because their large chromosomes and short life cycle make them ideal for studying hereditary changes.

You do have to put in a lot time to get good at anything and than includes cartoons. So I think it's true of art and everything else.

I will pick a raft of cartoons. And then later, it'll come time to run this cartoon. And I'll look at it, and I won't quite get it anymore. Because sometimes the grenade goes off in the moment, and then it doesn't repeat down the line.

Humor levels the playing field. I understood that early on - that was something I had.

To paraphrase president Kennedy's inaugural, the torch has been passed to a new generation of cartoonists and they are doing really interesting stuff, taking the old cliches and breathing new life into them and inventing new ones. This doesn't mean the previous generation of which I'm a charter member isn't doing good stuff but this new material is invigorating everyone.

There is humor that's just whimsy, that we smile at, but the humor that we laugh at, someone has to be - someone's dignity has to be reduced.

I think funny is just the foundation. I don't really think, to some extent, funny is the absolute most important thing. It should also communicate some idea through the medium of cartooning. Just to be funny is ... You know what, the things that you laugh hardest at aren't cartoons.

There is no Algorithm for Humor

As a cartoonist I do what I find funny. As an editor I have a broader approach realizing that humor is inherently subjective and I don't want my preferences to rule out what others might like.

None of the cartoons that I ever did are basically, if they're about sex, they're about sex in sort of this, you know, this ironic way, or the way that people actually treat it.

I've learned not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Why you would want to look any horse the mouth considering how infrequently they brush is beyond me.

I have a cartoon where the guy is pretty much, he's a regular-sized guy, but he's the size of the island. He's saying no man is an island, but I come pretty damn close.

I do find that humor helps in relationships. It certainly helps in my marriage now because I'm a very, very fallible person. And if I wasn't funny I'd be kicked right out the door.

I think what Jewish culture taught me and what the - and Jewish culture now is everyone's culture - is all these embarrassing things, all these guilt-filled things, all these anxiety filled things are material.

I'm pretty adept with computers and Photoshop for my blog, and I found my style with a conversational voice and an image-ready column.

People think you get one idea for a cartoon every week, and that's not the way it works. You usually get 10 or 15, and you're - certainly when I was a cartoonist, before I was a cartoon editor, you're rushing to do what is called the batch. When I was doing that, I liked to have, in general, about 10 cartoons.

When you look back at the older cartoons, they're very much more observational cartoons. And the cartoon - the people in the cartoons are not making the joke.

Cartoons, often, that you do for the New Yorker don't appear for months afterwards, and the record for that is a cartoon that was bought by James Stevenson in 1987 and didn't appear until 2000.

Professional humorists and cartoonists have to go through a stage in which they have to kill their own internal editor just so they can get stuff out. So whether they believe it or not, they need me on the other end to do that editing for them.

The most popular cartoon of mine is a guy on the phone looking at his appointment book and saying "No, Thursday's out. How about never, is never good for you?"

One of the first comic things you do is imitate.

I'm making fun of myself and I think I'm making fun of all men in our desperate, desperate attempt to understand the people we're with and hopefully through humor have them understand us.

The generations that were exposed to sitcom have the people actually saying the line, saying the joke, whereas sort of before that, you have much more observational humor.

The interesting thing about humor is that in humor, you - in logic, something is A or not A. In humor, it's both A and not A.

Cartoonists create so many cartoons on any given topic that we can follow the life cycle of a comic idea and how it evolves over time more quickly than we can with a form like the novel.

I'm really interested in the link between creativity and humor because humor is a type of creativity, and I do think that humorous people and humorous health helps creativity.