There’s public humor, and there’s private humor, and they’re all appropriate in their own way, and you shouldn’t – just as you wouldn’t have a megaphone and say certain things that you would say around your friends – things that are perfectly all right within your close social group with whom you share a certain context. Robert Mankoff Read Quote
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. Robert Mankoff Read Quote
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. Robert Mankoff Read Quote
One question about a joke is, how well is the strangeness of the situation resolved? At ‘The New Yorker’, we retain a lot of incongruity, tapping the playful part of the mind – Monty Python-type stuff. We also try to use humor as a vehicle for communicating ideas. Not editorial comment, but observation. Robert Mankoff Read Quote
I was the founder of the ‘Cartoon Bank’ in the ’90s. I was interested in finding ways for cartoonists to supplement their incomes. Robert Mankoff Read Quote
The New Yorker’ didn’t invent the magazine cartoon, but it did really establish it. Robert Mankoff Read Quote
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. Robert Mankoff Read Quote
The most offensive thing that ever occurred in ‘The New Yorker’ would be, like, the mildest thing at a Chris Rock concert. Robert Mankoff Read Quote
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. Robert Mankoff Read Quote
