Poking A Dead Frog Part 18

Being flexible can mean people want to work with you. A lot of people say fight for what you believe in and don't let them change it, but I want to say, fight less, and be open to the fact that other people might have a better idea.

I'm paraphrasing that great quote from [This American Life host] Ira Gla.s.s-basically the sentiment of, "Keep doing it, even though all your stuff is going to be pretty bad. But don't be discouraged by its imperfections; embrace it if it's half good. Fake it till you make it. Put things up. If they're sloppy, keep trying." I love his thought that n.o.body carves out this perfect jewel. Everybody struggles and does all these half attempts, and it's really more about time than it is about perfection.

Just put in the time, and don't be too precious about things. Work with your friends. And maybe, eventually, you'll get paid. [Laughs] If you're doing it for the money, then just forget it. When you sit at your computer and think, I'm going to write something really political and interesting, it's like, Okay, good luck with that!

People quit because it's really hard. It's hard to not have a house, hard not to have money, hard not to have insurance, hard not to be married, hard to have your parents ask you every day what you're going to do with your life. It's hard to wait tables while you're doing improv shows. It's hard to get up onstage and bomb. It's hard to lug your props around everywhere. It's hard to submit things that get rejected.

It's not easy! Good people make it look easy, and a lot of people want to do it because they think it looks easy. If you stick around, if you're a good collaborator, if you're open to new ideas and you keep trying, then you'll find there's a lot of different ways you can work as a writer. You can generate original material, or you can be a staff writer, or you can write about the comedy scene-all different things you might find you're good at if you stick around long enough.

ROZ CHAST.

During an interview with Roz Chast at the 2006 New Yorker Festival, comedian Steve Martin read aloud from one of her cartoons from February 1993. It was a fictional help-wanted cla.s.sified, touting the opportunity of a lifetime. The job? "To reorganize 760,000 files from top to bottom, fire four people n.o.body else will, and take care of children aged three and one." In addition, applicants would be expected to have an "up-to-date trucking license" and "knowledge of quantum physics." "There is so much literature involved," Martin remarked about this cartoon, and others. "So much writing."

Cartoons are mostly a visual medium; too many words add unnecessary clutter. But Chast, like the early New Yorker cartoonists, is a master at finding the perfect balance between the literary and the visual. Her cartoons do not depend on funny pictures, needless explanation, or rambling punch lines to sell the joke. She's a rarity among her creative brood-a cartoonist whose humor can be appreciated without the drawings.

Take this New Yorker cartoon from October 2002, which features the following catalog description beneath a simple drawing of a cardigan sweater: Item #3715-Cozy Cardigan: Snuggle up in this oh-so-cozy cardigan. Once you slip it on, you'll never want to take it off. We've improved the fit and the texture-it's a hug made of wool, a hug that never lets go before you're ready to be let go. Whether you're just sitting at home with your family, who must think you're some kind of automaton and take you for granted day in and day out, who can't be bothered to clean up after themselves, it's a wonder you're not a complete alcoholic, or whether you're going to work at the widget office where all day long, you have the privilege of watching your boss making goo-goo eyes at that thing in the black leather miniskirt that a normal person with her legs would never wear, and finally it's five o'clock and you can go home to your empty apartment overlooking two gas stations and a restaurant that is probably a Mafia money-laundering operation because it has all this expensive but ugly junk in it and about seven waiters per customer because no one ever eats there, and you wonder: Is this all there is?, this is the sweater you'll reach for over and over again. We guarantee it!

As with all great humor writers, Chast has a fascination with the tiny, seemingly insignificant details that are usually and all too easily ignored. Her cartoons-which have appeared in The New Yorker since 1978-have featured an array of characters, some of whom bear an uncanny resemblance to her own family members.

But many of Chast's most famous creations are insentient. Chast has devoted entire comics to wallpaper, lamps, boxes, electrical cords. She specializes in finding the "inner voice" of these objects-or, as her mother once referred to it, the "conspiracy of the inanimate." In one late-seventies cartoon, she gave a toaster a bow tie and a vase a string of pearls, and dressed a grandfather clock in a skirt and straw hat. ("You can dress them up," she wrote in the accompanying caption, "but you can't take them out.") Born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in the mid-fifties and sixties, Chast began drawing at age five-her first original comic strip, featuring two anthropomorphic birds, was named Jacky and Blacky-but it never crossed her mind that she might make a living in cartoons. However, within only a few months after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied with the future members of Talking Heads, Chast was already publishing her work in Christopher Street magazine and The Village Voice. A few years later, still in her twenties, she was invited to join the approximately forty cartoonists under contract with The New Yorker.

Today, Chast lives with her husband, humor writer Bill Franzen, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where she continues to write and ill.u.s.trate her cartoons. Her books include The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z!, co-written with Steve Martin; Theories of Everything, a career-spanning, four-hundred-page retrospective, featuring an introduction by New Yorker editor David Remnick; and Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a memoir about the deaths of her parents.

How much did The New Yorker mean to you growing up in Brooklyn in the fifties and sixties?

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 a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al 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 nine-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 c.o.c.ktail party. That just didn't make any sense to me; I had no idea what a c.o.c.ktail 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 signaling to the car behind him to pa.s.s, 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! Kids building guillotines in their rooms. 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 medical reference book] 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.

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 pa.s.sed 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 once 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 ADD 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 on to a kite long enough I would be lifted into the sky.

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 fifties, 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 "c.r.a.p." They did buy me Cla.s.sic Comics, however. Have you ever seen them? They're ill.u.s.trated versions of Moby-d.i.c.k, 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 ill.u.s.trator actually drew them. So much work went into them, and they were really horrible.

I hated Andy Capp. A lot of daily strips were so depressing. They have that awful "joke" rhythm. Here's the set-up . . . and now . . . here comes the punch line! Ha, ha, ha! Everyone's laughing at the hilarity that ensued, except you! I could never imagine doing a weekly strip with the same rhythm and the same format week after week after week. You just want to kill yourself. I'm able to work on any subject in any format, and it's freeing.

You were a teenager during a period when comics were beginning to be criticized as being harmful for kids. Were your parents influenced by the 1954 anticomic screed, Seduction of the Innocent, by the psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham? The book implied that comic books would quickly lead our nation's children to ruin.

I think it might have been more of a cla.s.s issue. My parents 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 ninety-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. He's just hilarious. And so original.

Did your parents allow Mad in the house?

No.

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 sixties, 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 cla.s.ses 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 Stan Mack and Jules Feiffer were publishing their cartoons.

Jules Feiffer-just great, funny, insightful social commentary. The writing and drawing were a great combination. To me, it's crucial. It can't be just, Here's the writing, here's the ill.u.s.tration. The two have to add something to each other and they have to be intertwined in a deep way.

What was the magazine-cartoon market like in the late seventies?

There were very few outlets. When I first began to sell my cartoons in the late seventies, I was mostly dropping them off at The Village Voice and National Lampoon. I was once a.s.signed to do an ill.u.s.tration for the Voice about corporal punishment in schools, and I drew a female teacher standing on a desk, in an S&M leather outfit, cracking a whip. I guess I thought it was funny. Other people didn't think so. The "golden age of cartooning," as the cartoonist Sam Gross used to call it, was finished 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 [the p.o.r.nographic men's magazine] Gent.

That process was already over when I started to pitch my cartoons to magazines in the late seventies. 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 sixties. 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 exactly 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.

By the time I got to The New Yorker, almost everyone wrote their own gags. I think maybe some of the really old-timers were buying gags. When The New Yorker just began, for the first twenty years or so, the captions to cartoons weren't usually written by the cartoonist. In the sixties, the balance started to tip in favor of the artist and writer being one and the same.

How old were you when you sold your first cartoon to The New Yorker?

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."

The cartooning was becoming less rigid than it used to be, looser. There were no more cannibal jokes. There were fewer c.o.c.ktail party cartoons. No b.u.ms or winos. Or, at the very least, if those were the subjects of the cartoons, then they had to be handled differently by the cartoonist. A lot of subjects weren't considered funny anymore.

Do you think that it helped your chances 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 seventies, although there'd been more in the past, like Mary Petty, Barbara Shermund, and Helen Hokinson. Now there are about five. I didn't think much about the "female" thing. I like to think that everyone I love is an influence in some tiny way. And even with people I hate, I think, That's something I never want to do.

Did you find those early New Yorker cartoons misogynistic or their humor too male-centric? There has been criticism over the years about James Thurber and his possibly stereotypical portrayal of the harping wife.

Most people drawing cartoons are guys; they draw things from a male perspective. I don't usually get too bent out of shape about that, because it doesn't help me. It just makes me agitated. The subject of what guys find funny, what women find funny, and how sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don't, is a complicated one. I really loved The Comeback, a very short-lived comedy with Lisa Kudrow [HBO, 2005]. Whereas a movie like [2012's Seth MacFarlanedirected] Ted, and how successful it is-that's a ticket to Depressionland for me. Not that I've seen it. Maybe it's a real side-splitter. I don't care about drawings of harping wives. Some wives harp.

How much were you paid for your first New Yorker cartoon?

Two hundred fifty dollars.

How much are you paid today for a New Yorker cartoon?

One thousand three hundred fifty dollars.

What was the reaction to your first New Yorker cartoon, published in 1978? 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," and so on. 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 compa.s.s at all. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

I don't dislike genre cartoons. In fact, I have done quite a few. I love tombstone gags, end-of-the-world guy gags, pushcart gags. But my favorite cartoonists have been the ones who create specific cartoon worlds, not just come up with a good gag line. I like being able to imagine what's in the rooms of the house that I'm not seeing in that particular cartoon. Like what's in those people's refrigerator.