Free The Humor Code by Peter McGraw Page B

over? Is it better to use a team-based approach, bouncing humorous ideas back and forth? Or is one single funny person all you need? And what about the giant industry that’s sprung up around comedy, from Hollywood films to sitcoms to meme-filled websites? Has the rise of big-budget comedy made things funnier—or dampened the joke?
    We hope to find the answers here in New York, a mass production and distribution center of American comedy, a place teeming with the film studios, television sets, publishing operations, ad firms, and theater stages that help generate, shape, and dispense one of the nation’s biggest cultural exports. It’s why we’re at the New Yorker offices, racking our brains about werewolves getting haircuts. Sure, we don’t really fit in with the swanky crowd, but we happen to be pals with New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff.
    In a famous episode of Seinfeld , the character Elaine comes up with a New Yorker cartoon and in the process tangles with the magazine’s cartoon editor. Although Bruce Eric Kaplan, a long-time New Yorker cartoonist, wrote the episode, the editor is nothing like Mankoff. The Seinfeld Bob Mankoff is an uppity New Yorker stereotype in a sweater vest and sports coat. The real Bob Mankoff is cool and engaging, if a bit intense, sporting a tailored jacket and wavy locks of shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair. (Regarding his portrayal in this book, Mankoff quipped, “The main thing I will be concerned with is how my hair is represented.”)
    The Seinfeld version of Bob Mankoff resists all attempts to explain the New Yorker cartoons, insisting, “Cartoons are like gossamer. And one doesn’t dissect gossamer.” But the real version of Bob Mankoff has never met a thread of gossamer he hasn’t sliced, diced, and stuck under a microscope. A onetime PhD student in experimental psychology—he taught pigeons how to sort addresses by ZIP code—he’s a member of the International Society of Humor Studies. We’d first met Mankoff when he was making the rounds of humor conferences, presenting on the science of why LOLCat images would never be set among the publication’s rarefied Adobe Caslon typeface.
    No wonder we get along. And when he offered us a behind-the-scenes look at the New Yorker ’s cartoon operation, we didn’t hesitate. After all, the magazine looms large in the world of American humor creation. Before the New Yorker was filled with names like Truman Capote, E. B. White, and Malcolm Gladwell, it started as the 1920s version of The Onion . As Ohio University communications professor Judith Yaros Lee wrote in Defining New Yorker Humor , the humor publication was one of the first to target a specific socioeconomic demographic (college-educated, upwardly mobile urban professionals), and to match this population’s sense of humor, the magazine’s jokes were groundbreakingly intelligent, topical, and a bit dangerous. In the world of published comedy, the New Yorker was a turning point. According to literature professor and author Sanford Pinsker, when the first issue rolled off the press on February 21, 1925, “The ‘character’ of American humor changed.” 2
    Part of that transformation was due to the magazine’s cartoons. Harold Ross, the New Yorker ’s founder, once joked that because of all the visual gags, his magazine had been described to him as “the best magazine in the world for a person who cannot read.” 3 But they weren’t just silly drawings. The entire cartoon medium changed thanks to the New Yorker ’s one-two punch of a concise, clever image combined with a witty, short caption. As Lee put it to me over the phone, “The central discovery of the New Yorker cartoon was not the one-line caption, but rather the idea that the caption and the drawing worked together to convey a comic idea.” That combination stuck around, revolutionizing the