Robert Mankoff
Robert Mankoff
Robert "Bob" Mankoffis an American cartoonist, editor, and author. He is the current cartoon editor for The New Yorker magazine. Before he succeeded Lee Lorenz as cartoon editor, Mankoff was a cartoonist for The New Yorker for twenty years...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArtist
CountryUnited States of America
book phones guy
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?"
cartoon approach visuals
I'm very fond of the strictly visual cartoons I did when I was breaking in in the 1970's. Over time I migrated to a more verbal approach.
laughter people groups
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.
thinking drawing realizing
Primitive, naive drawing can also be good drawing but it's hard to pull off. I don't think most submitters realize that.
art thinking cartoon
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.
harder dislike
It's always harder satirize what you like rather than what you dislike.
doors helping persons
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.
horse looks mouths
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.
couple thinking talking
Sometimes you're noodling around with a sketch and something incongruous in the drawing calls forth the caption and other times you think of a line and just have to find a place for it. A cartoon with a caption like "I don't want to live forever, but I sure as hell don't want to be dead forever either" sprang into my head and I just had to find the right venue for it which was an old couple talking to each other.
giving cartoon digital
The digital realm give cartoons and cartoonists more possibilities for exposure.
thinking editors ideas
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.
cartoon months records
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.
talent internet gatekeepers
A lot of what the Internet is showing is that talent is more disperse than gatekeepers such as myself.
laughing whimsy dignity
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.