Guest Blogger: The New Yorker

The Talk of the Town

Every Wednesday afternoon cartoonist Drew Crappe drives the two miles from his Frank Lode-Ovshite designed Long Island home to the post office in Inheritauk.
His latest unfunny cartoon is neatly wrapped in brown paper and stamped for immediate dispatch to Ben Asleepe, the New Yorker's cartoon editor.
"I realize that my cartoons are really bad." Drew says as he gazes across the blue souless expanse of Apathy Sound. "But nobody at the magazine cares and Ben is an old buddy of mine."
Drew and Ben were at Harvard together in the fifties. "Even the Harvard Lampoon rejected everything we did." Drew says. "So we started our own college weekly called the The Cambridge Lampoon. We weren't very clever, creative or original back then. Fifty years later and we've not changed at all!"
"Drew has basically been working with the same idea since high school." Ben Asleepe tells me as he delegates all his work to an unpaid intern. "It wasn't funny then and it's not funny now, but fortunately the readers of the New Yorker will accept any old trash. It's a pretty low-brow publication these days. People always cancel their subscriptions but we still send them magazines anyway"
He shifts some drawings around on his desk, points at them and sighs: "These are pretty damn good cartoons but I'm not related to any of the guys who did them. There's no nepotism involved so I can't use them. It's as simple as that. Drew is family and so I have to put one of his cartoons in every week otherwise my wife would kill me."
Back in Inheritauk, Drew Crappe is skimming stones across Apathy Sound. "I guess I ought to be ashamed of myself, eh?" he says. "But the New Yorker only costs $3.95 per issue so I'm not that bothered really. You get what you pay for in this world .... and, anyway, even my dreadfully drawn and totally unfunny cartoons are much, much better than the 'Shouts and Murmurs' garbage they print; now that's a truly terrible section of the magazine."

Heimlich Humbugger

Comments

[Quicquid]

Inheritauk. That's good.

[Mortimer Shy]

Consider also the unbroken record The New Yorker has of publishing the consistently worst poetry over the last half a century. The only way you can tell it is supposed to be poetry is that is ragged right.

[Offal Quippe]

I find Drew Crappe's cartoons especially challenging to note when the New Yorker picks him for the weekly caption contest. No matter how many times I've entered a suggested bon mot attached to his cartoon, I've failed even to qualify as 1 of the 3 finalists. It must be something that I'm missing in his renditions of subliminal life....

[Bleak Mouse]

Unfunny cartoons make me feel like a highly sophisticated intellectual. When I pass around an unfunny cartoon, it is the yokels and nobrows who say, "I don't get it." They don't get invitations to any more parties.