Robert Mankoff
Robert Mankoff
Robert "Bob" Mankoffis an American cartoonist, editor, and author. He is the current cartoon editor for The New Yorker magazine. Before he succeeded Lee Lorenz as cartoon editor, Mankoff was a cartoonist for The New Yorker for twenty years...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArtist
CountryUnited States of America
harder dislike
It's always harder satirize what you like rather than what you dislike.
cartoon needs amount
Each cartoon needs the right amount of wrong.
bad humor line people taste truth
The line between humor and bad taste is your audience, in which some people will find everything offensive, and some people will find nothing offensive, but the truth is that most humor originates in what would be called bad taste.
people
I don't think most people know what's going to be in their obituary, but I do.
comic
One of the first comic things you do is imitate.
short-life fruit-flies cartoon
Cartoons are like fruit flies. Biologists use fruit flies because their large chromosomes and short life cycle make them ideal for studying hereditary changes.
levels fields understood
Humor levels the playing field. I understood that early on - that was something I had.
certain close humor perfectly private public share social whom
There's public humor, and there's private humor, and they're all appropriate in their own way, and you shouldn't - just as you wouldn't have a megaphone and say certain things that you would say around your friends - things that are perfectly all right within your close social group with whom you share a certain context.
invent
'The New Yorker' didn't invent the magazine cartoon, but it did really establish it.
I am a 'made' cartoonist, but I was born a comic.
humor
The interesting thing about humor is that in humor, you - in logic, something is A or not A. In humor, it's both A and not A.
chris occurred
The most offensive thing that ever occurred in 'The New Yorker' would be, like, the mildest thing at a Chris Rock concert.
goes grenade pick quite raft run time
I will pick a raft of cartoons. And then later, it'll come time to run this cartoon. And I'll look at it, and I won't quite get it anymore. Because sometimes the grenade goes off in the moment, and then it doesn't repeat down the line.
believe editor humorists internal whether
Professional humorists and cartoonists have to go through a stage in which they have to kill their own internal editor just so they can get stuff out. So whether they believe it or not, they need me on the other end to do that editing for them.