Robert Mankoff Quotes

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.

There is no Algorithm for Humor

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.

Im pretty adept with computers and Photoshop for my blog, and I found my style with a conversational voice and an image-ready column.

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

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.

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

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.

Each cartoon needs the right amount of wrong.

There are no cartoons about happy marriages.

It's not the ink, it's the think.

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

The ability to be funny is pretty widespread in the population.

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.

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

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.

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

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?"

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.

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

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

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.

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.

There's all kinds of theories among the cartoonists: start with funniest, end with funniest.

There's usually nothing in a guy's joke in which we have to understand what's going on in someone else's mind.

We have to know cognitively what another mind is thinking and also empathically what they're feeling. And of course, in general, that's always the case, but it's often very generic. Like with Leo Cullum's doctor, it's just the fact that people in general are cruel and insensitive. But in the Barbara Smaller cartoon, we understand it's this particular person or this specific sub-class of person and her particular needs and desires, and that's different than a pun cartoon in which it's just semantic.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I think The New Yorker's cartoons aren't very political because the people who do the cartoons aren't awfully political people, and they aren't paid to be political. I think editorial cartoonists are. That's what they do. They probably have a great natural interest in politics, and then they are paid to do it, so they sort of have to hunt out these ideas. I admire editorial cartoons, but I'm also sort of happy that I don't do them because I'd hate to have to label things and I'd especially hate, more than anything, to label something Dennis Hastert or Mark Foley.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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