Robert Mankoff Quotes & Sayings

There is no Algorithm for Humor — Robert Mankoff

One question about a joke is, how well is the strangeness of the situation resolved? At 'The New Yorker', we retain a lot of incongruity, tapping the playful part of the mind - Monty Python-type stuff. We also try to use humor as a vehicle for communicating ideas. Not editorial comment, but observation. — Robert Mankoff

Cartoonists create so many cartoons on any given topic that we can follow the life cycle of a comic idea and how it evolves over time more quickly than we can with a form like the novel. — Robert Mankoff

It's always harder satirize what you like rather than what you dislike. — Robert Mankoff

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. — Robert Mankoff

Primitive, naive drawing can also be good drawing but it's hard to pull off. I don't think most submitters realize that. — Robert Mankoff

There is humor that's just whimsy, that we smile at, but the humor that we laugh at, someone has to be - someone's dignity has to be reduced. — Robert Mankoff

One of the first comic things you do is imitate. — Robert Mankoff

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. — Robert Mankoff

I'm really interested in the link between creativity and humor because humor is a type of creativity, and I do think that humorous people and humorous health helps creativity. — Robert Mankoff

The most popular cartoon of mine is a guy on the phone looking at his appointment book and saying "No, Thursday's out. How about never, is never good for you?" — Robert Mankoff

I know everybody wants humor to be subversive and speak truth to power. I don't think power's been listening, incidentally. — Robert Mankoff

I think funny is just the foundation. I don't really think, to some extent, funny is the absolute most important thing. It should also communicate some idea through the medium of cartooning. Just to be funny is ... You know what, the things that you laugh hardest at aren't cartoons. — Robert Mankoff

'The New Yorker' didn't invent the magazine cartoon, but it did really establish it. — Robert Mankoff

I think what Jewish culture taught me and what the - and Jewish culture now is everyone's culture - is all these embarrassing things, all these guilt-filled things, all these anxiety filled things are material. — Robert Mankoff

Humor is basically a cognitive process. And it's a creative process not only on the part of the cartoonist but on the part of the viewer. — Robert Mankoff

When you look back at the older cartoons, they're very much more observational cartoons. And the cartoon - the people in the cartoons are not making the joke. — Robert Mankoff

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. — Robert Mankoff

You do have to put in a lot time to get good at anything and than includes cartoons. So I think it's true of art and everything else. — Robert Mankoff

I'm very fond of the strictly visual cartoons I did when I was breaking in in the 1970's. Over time I migrated to a more verbal approach. — Robert Mankoff

People often ask me about my upbringing, and if there was anything particular about it that made me become a cartoonist. — Robert Mankoff

I have a cartoon where the guy is pretty much, he's a regular-sized guy, but he's the size of the island. He's saying no man is an island, but I come pretty damn close. — Robert Mankoff

I'm making fun of myself and I think I'm making fun of all men in our desperate, desperate attempt to understand the people we're with and hopefully through humor have them understand us. — Robert Mankoff

People think you get one idea for a cartoon every week, and that's not the way it works. You usually get 10 or 15, and you're - certainly when I was a cartoonist, before I was a cartoon editor, you're rushing to do what is called the batch. When I was doing that, I liked to have, in general, about 10 cartoons. — Robert Mankoff

There are no cartoons about happy marriages. — Robert Mankoff

Cartoons, often, that you do for the New Yorker don't appear for months afterwards, and the record for that is a cartoon that was bought by James Stevenson in 1987 and didn't appear until 2000. — Robert Mankoff

Humor of all types is notoriously subjective. That's true not only between different people but even within an individual at different times. This subjectivity is often masked when your in a group because laughter is contagious. — Robert Mankoff

To paraphrase president Kennedy's inaugural, the torch has been passed to a new generation of cartoonists and they are doing really interesting stuff, taking the old cliches and breathing new life into them and inventing new ones. This doesn't mean the previous generation of which I'm a charter member isn't doing good stuff but this new material is invigorating everyone. — Robert Mankoff

I was the founder of the 'Cartoon Bank' in the '90s. I was interested in finding ways for cartoonists to supplement their incomes. — Robert Mankoff

As a cartoonist I do what I find funny. As an editor I have a broader approach realizing that humor is inherently subjective and I don't want my preferences to rule out what others might like. — Robert Mankoff

I have been married three times and it just keeps better and better, but I'm going to stop here. — Robert Mankoff

Each cartoon needs the right amount of wrong. — Robert Mankoff

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. — Robert Mankoff

I've learned not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Why you would want to look any horse the mouth considering how infrequently they brush is beyond me. — Robert Mankoff

A lot of what the Internet is showing is that talent is more disperse than gatekeepers such as myself. — Robert Mankoff

Sometimes you're noodling around with a sketch and something incongruous in the drawing calls forth the caption and other times you think of a line and just have to find a place for it. A cartoon with a caption like "I don't want to live forever, but I sure as hell don't want to be dead forever either" sprang into my head and I just had to find the right venue for it which was an old couple talking to each other. — Robert Mankoff

Cartoons are like fruit flies. Biologists use fruit flies because their large chromosomes and short life cycle make them ideal for studying hereditary changes. — Robert Mankoff

If you have any problems at all, don't hesitate to shut up. — Robert Mankoff

I'm pretty adept with computers and Photoshop for my blog, and I found my style with a conversational voice and an image-ready column. — Robert Mankoff

The digital realm give cartoons and cartoonists more possibilities for exposure. — Robert Mankoff

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. — Robert Mankoff

I don't think most people know what's going to be in their obituary, but I do. — Robert Mankoff

I am a 'made' cartoonist, but I was born a comic. — Robert Mankoff

While the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit. — Robert Mankoff

None of the cartoons that I ever did are basically, if they're about sex, they're about sex in sort of this, you know, this ironic way, or the way that people actually treat it. — Robert Mankoff

Humor levels the playing field. I understood that early on - that was something I had. — Robert Mankoff

The most offensive thing that ever occurred in 'The New Yorker' would be, like, the mildest thing at a Chris Rock concert. — Robert Mankoff

I do find that humor helps in relationships. It certainly helps in my marriage now because I'm a very, very fallible person. And if I wasn't funny I'd be kicked right out the door. — Robert Mankoff

The generations that were exposed to sitcom have the people actually saying the line, saying the joke, whereas sort of before that, you have much more observational humor. — Robert Mankoff

It's not the ink, it's the think. — Robert Mankoff