Bruce Eric Kaplan
Bruce Eric Kaplan
Bruce Eric Kaplan, known as BEK, is an American cartoonist whose single-panel cartoons frequently appear in The New Yorker. His cartoons are known for their signature simple style and often dark humor. Kaplan is also a screenwriter and has worked on Seinfeld and on Six Feet Under. Kaplan wove his New Yorker cartooning into Seinfeld with the episode "The Cartoon." He graduated from Wesleyan University and studied there with Professor Jeanine Basinger...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth9 September 1964
CountryUnited States of America
When I'm on the set, I'll come up with ideas if I'm sort of just between responsibilities, because there's a lot of sitting around on set. Invariably, though, the stuff I come up with on the set tends to be bad.
When I was a kid, and I was watching TV, I just loved it so much that I wanted to crawl into that TV.
We are all just little dolls of ourselves. Who occasionally pull back the curtains to reveal the real us.
My mother couldn't take having three boys. She was extremely jumpy, to say the least. Any noise startled her. The sound of a pot dropping on the ground could make her hit the ceiling.
My cartoon life is in my office, and it's very separate and getting very in my own head. My television life is I'm begging one of the actors to say the line in the way I'd like them to.
James Thurber was an inspiration because his drawings were so primitive. I am self-taught - I didn't go to art school - so I thought when I started doing them, 'If James Thurber can be a cartoonist, I can,' because his stuff is very raw.
When I was a kid, I would be watching TV shows like, you know, like 'Get Smart' and be like, 'That's what being an adult is.'
Sometimes I'll be reading something online and just get so frustrated because of what people are saying.
Shooting in Los Angeles is always pleasant and comfortable. Shooting in New York is like being on 'Survivor.'
One identity is as a television writer, which is very classically Southern California, but another of my personae is as a New Yorker cartoonist.
No, I never - no one ever - I never learned anything when I was a kid. Honestly, my parents had nothing to tell me - like, no wisdom, nothing.
My father would often start to say something, then say 'Forget it.'
It's self-soothing for me to draw. So if I'm upset, drawing makes me less upset.
In television writing, you want to hear what the characters say as opposed to giving them something to say. It's the same with the cartoons.