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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 II).By Mike Sacks- - - - Read Part I of this conversation here. - - - - 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 old were you when you sold your first cartoon to the New Yorker? CHAST: I was twenty-three. I went under contract at the end of that first year. I think a lot of it had to do with my being in the right place at the right time. Maybe the magazine wanted to attract younger readers. Lee Lorenz was the art editor at the time. I will always be grateful to him. Did you feel that the New Yorker wanted to include underground cartoonists and their sensibility in the magazine? No, not underground, exactly. I didn't have that sense at that time at all. I think they just wanted to open it up a little to maybe a "younger sensibility." Do you feel that it helped that you were a female cartoonist? There weren't many at the New Yorker at the time. I'm pretty sure it wasn't only because I was female. I signed my cartoons "R." They didn't know what I was. I think there was only one other female New Yorker cartoonist in the late 70s, although there'd been more in the past, like Helen Hokinson, Mary Petty, Barbara Shermund, and others. Now there are about five. I didn't think much about the "female" thing. How much were you paid for your first New Yorker cartoon? $250. How much are you paid today for a New Yorker cartoon? $1,300. What was the reaction to your first one? Even looking at it today, I find it to be very odd and different. It's called "Little Things," and it features bizarre shapes with funny names: "chent," "spak," "kabe," "tiv," etc. There's no gag − at least in the traditional sense. I think a lot of readers were pretty perturbed. Some of the older New Yorker cartoonists were really bothered by that cartoon, too. It's strange that Lee chose that one. I had submitted fifty or sixty, and this was the weirdest in the batch. It was so rough and personal, and it was so weird. [Laughs] Later, Lee told me that somebody had asked him whether he owed my family any money. It was certainly a break from the type of New Yorker cartoon that came before. I knew that my cartoons were quite different, which is why I never really thought they would appear in the New Yorker. I never deliberately set out to be different; that's just how I draw. But if I tried to conform to somebody else's idea of what's funny, I'd have no compass at all. I wouldn't even know where to begin. Has the New Yorker's submission process changed for you since you first began? No, it hasn't changed much at all. I've submitted, let's see: thirty years times forty-six weeks on average a year . . . whatever that is, since I first started, and I still do it basically the same way: Each week I submit between five and ten cartoons. Usually, about six or seven. And how many, on average, will be accepted each week? It's really hard to say. I might average one per issue for maybe three or four weeks in a row, but then I might go for three or four weeks and not sell any. And then the next week, for no reason at all, it seems, they'll buy two. Someone once told me about a psychological experiment that was done with rats: if you keep rewarding the rats with a pellet each time they push a lever, they will eventually become bored and stop pushing the lever. And if they receive no pellets at all, they'll get discouraged and stop pushing the lever. But if you provide them with intermittent, random pellets, they just keep pushing that lever. Sometimes I feel like I am that rat. It's a tough business. You only feel as good as your last sale. Even this many years later, I still get depressed if I haven't made a sale for a couple of weeks. I always feel like that's the end of it, you know − I really have run out of ideas! You would think that by now I would understand that when I get depressed, it's part of the cycle. But it's still hard. The fact is, there are no guarantees. I don't know too many cartoonists who are super-confident people. Do you hand-deliver these cartoons to the New Yorker office? I used to go every week, but it just took too much time. In the 80s, I'd have a weekly lunch with the rest of the New Yorker cartoonists. But when we all moved out of the city, the group disbanded. I feel I can better use my time to stay at home and work. Or procrastinate. Anyway, once a week, I fax a batch of rough sketches to the New Yorker offices. I try to draw pretty much what the finished cartoon will look like. You know, if people are standing in a room, I'll sketch the room, but I won't put in all of the fine detail until the cartoon is bought. The initial versions are always rough. If they buy it, I do a "finish" − a finished version of the sketch. How long does a finish take? For a very simple drawing, it might take an hour and a half. For a more complicated one, especially those in color, it might take several hours. What exactly goes on in a New Yorker cartoon meeting? To me − and, I think, to many others − the New Yorker is almost like the Kremlin. It's a world of mystery, smoke, and mirrors. I've never been to a New Yorker art meeting where the editors talked about cartoons. It'd be like peeking in on your parents and accidentally seeing them doing things you know they do, but don't want to think about them doing. I once read an article that described the process, but I've since repressed it. As much as I would like to imagine the editors saying, "This one is really good, but this one is even better!," I know the disgusting, painful reality. Do a lot of these ideas for cartoons gestate for a long time before you sketch them? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Often, ideas will crop up when I'm in my studio just doodling and thinking. I remember when I was drawing "The Fantastic Voyage" [Scientific American, July 2002]. I had been thinking about the cliché of spaceships and strange submarine-like vehicles that would travel through the body in sci-fi films from the 50s and 60s. I wondered, What if people were in a broken-down bus instead? Or in the family sedan? That's how that cartoon came about. I once doodled a crazy man holding a sign that read: THE END IS NEAR I just felt like drawing one of these guys − who knows why. After looking at the guy for a while, I realized that he needed a crazy wife. So I drew him a wife, and she was holding up a sign that said: YOU WISH. That one came out of the blue. What ideas are you currently mulling over? I'm working on an idea now. I wrote down, "Break Internet." I like the thought of breaking the Internet, as if it were a toy or an appliance. Now that I describe it, it sounds pretty lame. [The cartoon was not bought.] How extensive is your backlog of unsold cartoons? Thousands and thousands. It's an ocean of rejection. A lot of them are very dated, and a lot of them are just plain bad, but in that pile I will sometimes find something I want to rework. I have so many rejected drawings that it almost becomes raw material for me. When I'm stuck, I sometimes go into that file, and I'll see if there's an idea hiding that can be fixed. How much time do you spend on the exact wording of your cartoons? It really depends. Sometimes a cartoon will be very clear in my head from the minute I conceptualize it. Other times − especially with a multi-panel "story" cartoon − it takes longer. I like the editing process. I think − I hope − that this is something I've gotten better at as I've gotten older. I probably could have done more self-editing when I was younger. Specifically, what sort of self-editing? Eliminating things I don't need; paying attention to the rhythm of a joke. I don't want to make anyone read more than absolutely necessary. I wonder how many readers even notice how finely structured the wording is in certain cartoons − such as with your work, or Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury," or Gary Larson's "The Far Side." There's never an extra comma or beat. Bad rhythm is something you see frequently with amateur cartoonists. With that said, there are times when I can feel the rhythm of a cartoon more clearly than at other times. I work on deadline, and I have to do this whether I'm in the mood to work or not. But why I'm in the mood sometimes and not at other times is still a mystery. Do you have tricks you've taught yourself that have made the process less difficult? Getting away from work and coming back to it fresh really helps. Also, Truman Capote once said that if you have to leave a manuscript or a chapter, don't finish up the last little bit, because then, when you come back, you'll have to re-start from nothing. I've often used this approach. If I'm going downstairs for lunch, I leave something I'm excited to come back to − so I won't be starting from zero miles per hour. But it doesn't always work. Do you consider yourself as much a writer as a cartoonist? I don't consider myself as much of a writer as a "real" writer − those writers who write without drawings. And I don't consider myself as much of an artist as a "real" artist − somebody who paints without using any words. But cartooning is a hybrid, and cartoonists are hybrids. We feel incomplete doing just one or the other. When I have to write and I can't use pictures, it's very frustrating. So where do you see the art of cartooning in the future? Do you think it'll remain a viable profession? I don't know how viable it is now. It's a very tough profession. I really don't know whether cartooning for magazines will stick around. There's a lot written about teenagers and print media and how irrelevant the non-electronic media might soon become. I really don't know what's going to happen. But I do know that if someone wants to become a cartoonist, they're going to find an outlet. I'd like to learn more about animation programs. If there were a computer program that wasn't too difficult to learn, I might just give it a shot. Hopefully you can always learn something new− always, always, always. Key word: "hopefully." Any advice for cartoonists starting out with their careers? I'm really grateful for the life-drawing classes I took at art school. Not that anyone looking at my characters would believe it, but I think life-drawing is really important. A cartoonist has to know how a body sits or stands on a page. It's like learning a language. I feel that on my deathbed, which is something I hope to eventually have, I'll probably look back and wish that I didn't always look on the dark side of everything. But how can you not? You could die at any time, for any reason. You're walking under an air conditioner, and kaboom! My parents actually know someone who was killed by a falling flowerpot. But we have to kind of go along and put one foot in front of the other and pretend that we don't know that everything could take a serious turn for the worse in the next second. It's all in the pretending. Yes, it's all in the pretending. Any of us could walk outside right now and Mr. Anvil could suddenly meet Mr. Top of Head. But we pretend otherwise. Actually, that'd make for a nice cartoon. And if I'm safely off to the side while it happens to you, and if there's a deadline looming, I would absolutely love to draw it. [Laughs] - - - - 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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