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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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And Here's the Kicker: Mike Sacks's Conversations With Humor Writers.- - - - McSweeney's Internet Tendency contributor Mike Sacks' new book, And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft, is available now on Amazon.com and in most bookstores in July. The figure "21" is a bit of a misnomer, as Sacks wanted 25 interviews to be included in the book. The publisher, however, felt otherwise. Why? Oh, money. What follows is one of the interviews that was left out of the book. It was no more deserving of being cut than any of the others. So, if you will, please look at this as a sort of special "bonus" feature from the book.- - - - C O N V E R S A T I O N 1 ROZ CHAST (Part I).By Mike Sacks- - - - During an interview with Roz Chast at the 2006 New Yorker Festival, Steve Martin read aloud from one of her cartoons. It was a fictional help-wanted classified, touting the "opportunity of a lifetime." Among the many absurd qualifications, applicants were expected to have an up-to-date trucker's license and knowledge of quantum physics. "There is so much literature involved," Martin remarked about this cartoon, and others. "So much writing." Roz Chast − whose cartoons have appeared in the New Yorker since 1978 − has always been a master at finding the perfect balance between the literary and the visual. Her cartoons do not depend on funny pictures to sell the joke. But, at the same time, they never seem overcrowded and dense with needless explanation or rambling punch lines. She's a rarity among her creative brood − a cartoonist whose humor can be appreciated without the drawings. - - - - SACKS: How much did the New Yorker mean to you, growing up in Brooklyn in the 50s and 60s? CHAST: Not much, truthfully. The New Yorker wasn't something that I focused on when I was a little kid, even though my parents subscribed. I read Highlights for Children. It wasn't until I was about eight or nine that I discovered the old New Yorker cartoonists like Charles Addams. My parents were both involved with education. My mother was an assistant principal at a Brooklyn elementary school, and my father taught high school. Each summer, we would drive from Brooklyn to Ithaca, New York, to Cornell University, and we'd rent graduate-student housing, because it was cheap. When my parents attended lectures, they'd stick me in the browsing library in the student center. There was one section that contained only cartoon books. I would look through these books and just die. I especially loved Charles Addams. It was the funniest stuff I had ever seen − just amazing. I still remember the books: Monster Rally, Addams and Evil, Black Maria, Drawn and Quartered ... What was it about Addams's cartoons that appealed to a 9-year-old? For one thing, I "got" them. I couldn't relate to some of the other New Yorker cartoons, like the ones in which grown-ups said witty things to each other at a cocktail party. That just didn't make any sense to me; I had no idea what a cocktail party was, really. But with Addams, I understood the jokes. It was sick humor − very black. They were funny to me. Plus, there were kids in them! A few of his cartoons I've never forgotten. One had an entire family pouring boiling oil onto a group of holiday carolers. In another one, the Uncle Fester character is waving to the car behind him to pass, even though he knows an oncoming truck is approaching. Or the cartoon where Uncle Fester is grinning as he watches a movie, while everyone else sobs. So many great ones! Very transgressive. Wolcott Gibbs, the New Yorker writer, once wrote that Addams's work was a denial of all of the spiritual and physical evolution in the human race. Maybe I related to that. Even when you were nine? Oh, when I was a kid I was obsessed with all sorts of weird, creepy, dark things. I was fascinated with medical oddities and bizarre diseases. My mother's sister was a nurse, so we always had The Merck Manual lying around. I didn't understand much of it, but I did understand the symptoms. Just the faint possibility that I might have leprosy or lockjaw or gangrene . . . tantalizing and terrifying. I'm still fascinated with that sort of thing. Last night I watched this incredible medical show on television and [laughs] . . . I shouldn't laugh, because it's not funny at all, but the show featured a woman who turned silver. She turned what? Her skin turned silver, but I can't remember why. I suppose it doesn't matter, really. It doesn't matter, it's true. Oh, actually, I do know why! When she was a kid, a doctor prescribed nasal drops that had silver in it. And you're not confusing this person with a superhero? No, she was definitely just a normal woman who turned silver. The condition is called argyria. To me, that's the ideal type of disease show. If I watch a show that features, say, a man with an extra arm growing out of his shoulder, I know that I don't have that condition and I never will. Same with parasitic twins. Horrifying, but not contagious. What is it about these medical conditions that fascinated you? Are you intrigued by the outsider element? Have you ever seen Dear Dead Days? It's a book by Charles Addams [Putnam, 1959], and it's a compendium of all of these odd images − weird photos of patients suffering from rare diseases, criminals, revolting or frightening architecture, wheelchairs. I loved that book. Many writers and cartoonists are fascinated by people who live on the outskirts of society − criminals, the mentally ill, those suffering from deformities. Those people are more interesting than the everyday humdrum. To quote [photographer] Diane Arbus, "Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats." I suppose it's also helpful for a creative person to look where others might not be looking. Maybe. If I could, I would look where everyone else is looking. But my attention is always drawn elsewhere. When I was in school, trying to listen to the teacher talk about the French and Indian War, I would be distracted by irrelevant things like the ugly shoes she was wearing. You drew a New Yorker cartoon about that. I did. It was called "Newly Discovered Learning Disabilities" [December 3, 2001], and one of the entries was "Doodler's Syndrome." The child in the cartoon insisted on drawing and didn't hear a thing the teacher was saying − very similar to my own experience. You'd be labeled A.D.D. today. Oh, absolutely! It's still very hard for me to pay strict attention to something that I have to listen to. I once drew a cartoon called "Adult Attention Deficit Disorders" [The New Yorker, June 7, 2004]. It included "Financial Information Disorder," "Driving Directions Deafness," and "Technical Manual Fatigue Syndrome." I suffer from all of them − and more. I'd love to be able to pay attention to a lecture about saving money on my taxes, but I'm always fascinated by the silver person sitting in front of me. How often does that actually happen? Not often enough. Were you a fearful child? I remember I was afraid of kites, but I have no idea why. Actually, I can sort of guess: I had an uncle who told me that if I were to hold onto a kite long enough I would be lifted into the sky. I'd say that's a pretty good reason. Everyone seems to have an uncle like that. Yes, they do. Kids believe anything you tell them. I did, anyway. I could easily convince myself that something bad was about to happen, or that I was about to come down with a terrible, incurable disease. My parents were older than all of my friends' parents. They came from a world where people actually did get diphtheria. I remember my mother describing having had diphtheria as a child; she said it was like having "a web across [her] throat." My grandmother supposedly stuck her finger down my mother's throat and pulled out the web. This was very real to me. I heard that diphtheria story many times. My parents were both forty-two when they had me in 1954. They were a link to another time and place, and that affected me greatly. A lot of my friends had parents who had experienced the excitement and the prosperity of the 50s, whether they were "red-diaper babies" or "Eisenhower babies." My parents didn't seem to know anything of that; I might as well have been raised during the Depression. My parents grew up poor in households that spoke mostly Yiddish. They were from the Old World. How did your parents feel when you achieved success? Did they understand your cartoons? Sort of, but they were more excited that I had insurance [laughs]. Did your parents allow you to own comic books? My parents were very serious; they did not like pop culture at all. Comics were considered "crap." They did buy me Classic Comics, however. Have you ever seen them? They're illustrated versions of Moby Dick, Robin Hood, and other works of literature. They were like pieces of candy that looked great but tasted terrible. The sad part was that an illustrator actually drew them. So much work went into them, and they were really horrible. They were like the "Prince Valiant" comic strips in the newspaper: meticulously drawn, but, to me, a waste of good comic space. Were your parents influenced by the Senate subcommittees on juvenile delinquency in the 1950s? And the 1954 anti-comic screed, Seduction of the Innocent, by the psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham? The book implied that comic books would lead our nation's children to ruin. I think it might have been more of a class issue. They thought comic books were for stupid people, and if I didn't want to be a stupid person with a stupid job who was going to live a stupid life in a stupid apartment and marry a stupid husband and have stupid children, then I shouldn't be reading comic books. I did manage to borrow some issues of Mad magazine from my cousin. I loved Don Martin and the way he wrote out all those amazing noises his characters made. I loved the way his characters' shoes would bend − you know, the top part of the shoe would sort of bend over at a 90-degree angle. He just drew funny. I've never forgotten one cartoon in particular, for some reason: a man in a bathroom is using a towel-dispensing machine, and a sign says: Push Down and Pull Up. This guy takes the whole machine and pushes it down and pulls it up, and rips it off the wall. The joke itself wasn't even that great. It was just the way Don Martin drew the guy's expression. He drew great expressions. Were Archie comics allowed in the house? To my parents, Archie was the devil. So, of course, that's what I wanted to read the most. I thought Archie comics were fantastic. Even though they already seemed kind of dated when I was reading them in the 60s, Archie and Jughead and Betty and Veronica were very seductive to me. Seduction of the innocent. Right. It was sort of a parallel universe with all these people who didn't look like they lived anywhere near Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn. There were no girls with beehive hairdos, or people who would punch you in the school hallways for no apparent reason. What did Manhattan represent to you, as someone who grew up right across the East River? Speaking of parallel universes! It was a different world for me, and it was magical. When I was young, I attended weekend art classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan, and I really liked it. As I got older − after I moved to the city − I loved it even more. As for my career goals, I never, ever thought that I would one day be published in the New Yorker. I was hoping that maybe, fingers crossed, I might one day have a strip in The Village Voice, because that's where Jules Feiffer and Stan Mack were published. When I first began to sell my cartoons in the late 70s, I was mostly dropping them off at The Village Voice and National Lampoon. What was the magazine-cartoon market like in the late 70s? There were very few outlets. The "golden age of cartooning," as the cartoonist Sam Gross used to call it, was over by this point. It used to be that all of the male cartoonists − and they were pretty much all male − would put their work into a portfolio each week. First, they'd go to the New Yorker, because that was the top of the heap. Whatever cartoons weren't bought would be taken to the editors of the next tier, like the Saturday Evening Post or Ladies' Home Journal or McCall's. They would make the rounds and work their way down the list, to the very bottom − maybe eventually even to [pornographic men's magazine] Gent. That process was already over when I started to pitch my cartoons to magazines in the late 70s. For one thing, there were so few magazines publishing cartoons. It was much more difficult to place them. It was pretty much down to the New Yorker and National Lampoon. There was Playboy, but that wasn't on my list. Did you always write your own cartoons? Or did you have outside gag writers help you? No, I always wrote my own. Gag writers were more common in the past. The tradition of the gag writer selling cartoon ideas to an artist had begun to end in the 60s. I didn't even know there was such a thing as gag writers until I became a cartoonist. A lot of famous cartoonists used them, like Peter Arno, George Price . . . even Charles Addams would sometimes buy gags − which really freaked me out. When I first started, for maybe the first seven or eight years, I would receive packets from gag writers. And that was very weird. The envelopes would arrive, and I'd just go, Arrrghhhhh! I knew that these people were going through a list of cartoonists' names, and mine was on there somewhere. The gags were always very traditional and mostly pretty lame: "Two guys standing in a bar talking," and then there'd be a corny punch line you'd read eighty times before. It was obvious they'd never seen a single cartoon of mine. Who were these gag writers? Were they doing it for fun, or did they actually make a living at it? I have no idea. I don't think they were young people, because I can't imagine a young person doing such a thing. I always imagined them as middle-aged men living alone in small apartments, above stores on main streets in sad, grim towns. Even the envelopes the gags came in were sad − all crumply and yellowed and hand-addressed in a saddish way. - - - - [Part II of this conversation - - - - Roz Chast's books, Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006 and The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z! (with Steve Martin) are available at your local bookseller.- - - -
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