Bob Mankoff: Anatomy of a New Yorker Cartoon

The New Yorker receives around 1,000 cartoons each week; it only publishes about 17 of them. In this funny and insightful talk, the magazine’s longstanding cartoon Editor and self-proclaimed ‘humour analyst’ Bob Mankoff dissects the comedy in some of the ‘idea drawings’ featured in the magazine, explaining what works, what doesn’t, and why.

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ABOUT Bob Mankoff

“Bob Mankoff has been the cartoon Editor for The New Yorker since 1997. But his association with the magazine started many years before that when he began submitting his own cartoons to the title in 1974. 2,000 rejections later, his first ‘idea drawing’ was finally accepted and published.

In 1980, he accepted a contract to contribute cartoons on a regular basis. Since then, more than 800 of his cartoons have been published in the magazine. These days, he’s mainly responsible for helping to select the 16 or 17 he says will actually make it into print.

Bob is also the Author or Editor of a number of books on cartoons and creativity including ‘The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity, and The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker’, published in 2004 and which featured every cartoon published to that point since the magazine’s debut in 1925.

He argues that “magazine cartoonists are the most creative people in the world: “If a scientist comes up with one new idea a year, he’s a genius. If a cartoonist comes up with only one new idea a day, he’s looking for other work.”

The VIDEO