Bob Mankoff has a pretty good idea about what’s funny. A cartoon in which a lab rat has hung itself and a researcher observes, “Discouraging data on the antidepressant”—that’s something Mankoff thinks is humorous.
And so do many readers of The New Yorker, where Mankoff is the cartoon editor. But others complained about the cartoon, calling it insensitive and unequivocally unfunny.
“Empirically, it is funny,” Mankoff said in one of several speeches last week during his weeklong visit to campus. But, he noted, the cartoon “wouldn’t have appeared in the magazine 25 years ago.”
Through the years, he said, social mores have changed dramatically. In that time, the cartoons in The New Yorker have evolved as well in ways that often reflect the broader transformations, he said.
“Society is a much coarser place than in the 1950s or ’60s,” Mankoff said.
Mankoff’s appearances were sponsored by the Department of Psychology and the Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellows. Mankoff has studied experimental psychology and is interested in the link between humor and psychology.
That relationship also intrigues Rich Gonzalez, chair and professor, Department of Psychology. He would like to explore the establishment of a center in which the psychology of humor would be studied, and he said The New Yorker may make available its database of 63,000 cartoons for such research.
“Psychology has very little to say about humor,” Gonzalez said. “Nobody has really studied what makes something funny.”
Access to the database would make it possible for researchers to examine such things as political satire through the years and how gender roles have changed through the decades, he says.
Cartoons from The New Yorker dating back to the 1920s are available at http://www.cartoonbank.com , of which Mankoff is president. Some of his cartoons are among the biggest sellers at the site, including the one pictured here. Another popular Mankoff cartoon shows a middle-aged husband and wife sitting in a living room, and the man says, “I’m sorry, dear. I wasn’t listening. Could you repeat what you’ve said since we’ve been married?”
Mankoff spoke about the selection process for cartoons, during which he and other editors put submissions into “yes,” “no” and “maybe” baskets. About 1,000 cartoons are submitted each week, but only about 17 run in an issue. A notable exception is the annual cartoon issue, which hit newsstands last week with its 75 or so cartoons.
Reactions to the cartoons vary. Some are laugh-out-loud funny, and “some are entirely intellectual,” Mankoff said. “You won’t laugh at it, but you’ll say, aha!'”
And at times, as with the lab rat cartoon, some readers will have neither of those reactions. Another example was a cartoon that ran last month, in which two girls are standing on a porch wearing Girl Scout uniforms, and one asks the homeowner, “Would you like to buy some Girl Scout crack?”
Mankoff thinks the people who criticized the cartoon misunderstood it. It wasn’t making fun of the Girl Scouts, he said; rather, it was a commentary on society.
“The cartoonist is satirizing and objecting to the coarseness of the universe,” he said.
He has a pragmatic view of the divergent reactions inspired by cartoons such as these. “Different people laugh at different things,” he said.
