Reoccurring Themes
Our own personal tropes
I’m going to let you know something about me, Ellis Rosen. Some of you are not going to like it. Please know that what I'm about to say is not a judgment on anyone who disagrees. It’s a mere opinion from a mere cartoonist.
Ok, here goes: I don’t like horoscopes. I don’t like horoscopes, and Myers-Briggs and anything else that attempts to define personalities. Here’s what I think personalities are like: inconsistent, contextual and fluid. Any time I decide “I am like X,” or “I am not like Y” I can find moments in my life that would tell you just the opposite. I dislike anything that attempts to help me define my personality because I believe personalities are mostly undefinable.
And yet-
I often find myself wondering “Who’s Ellis?” “What’s Ellis like?,” “If an Ellis leaves a station in Pittsburg at 2 P.M. on a Sunday and arrives in Georgia on Thursday, what’s one word you would use to describe him?” I can’t help it! I’m determined to answer a question that I firmly believe has no answer! It’s very frustrating. I am always on the lookout for my own version of a horoscope, something that will act as a mirror and reveal who I am in some sort of objective and cosmic manner.
I swear I’m going to get to the point. Cartoonists, you see, have large bodies of work. So I think, hey, maybe if I look at all of my cartoons, I can find something there, some sort of clue as to who I am. I’m not sure there’s a solution there but there are patterns. Certain themes or jokes that appear over and over. My own personal tropes. Which brings us to today’s topic.
I asked my fellow cartoonists to see if there were reoccurring themes in their own work and what those themes might say about themselves. Why do you have a ton of cartoons about God? What’s with all these jokes about cats? Why are you so attracted to themes of despair? No, seriously, what’s with all the cats? It’s like 85% cat jokes. It seems like it’s less about your love of cats and more about your deep hatred of dogs.
*NOTE: In order to keep this ToonStack within a reasonable length I had to limit the number of cartoon examples for each cartoonist.
Matt Diffee
One thing that I keep coming back to is a tendency to put my jokes on signage. My very first cartoon in The New Yorker was a guy holding a sign and I’ve been doing it ever since, signs on buildings, signs on the roadside, people holding signs. Things just seem funnier that way to me. Maybe it’s the formality of it. It makes the joke more subtle, dry, more deadpan. I’ve always gravitated towards that kind of comedic voice. In my twenties, I was deeply influenced by Steven Wright’s droll one-liners and the very proper absurdity of Monty Python, comedy with a straight face, you could say. And to me, jokes delivered via signage is the visual equivalent of that. Maybe. Here are a couple examples.
Emily Flake
I’ve been trying to work “ortolan” into a cartoon for forever, mainly because I think it’s such an utterly absurd example of the cruel theatricality of wealth (if you, ahem, don’t know, ortolans are itty-bitty birds served whole, drowned quite literally in brandy and eaten under a napkin {!!!}). But I could not find any of my ortolan gags (ho HO!), so I present to you another personal trope: Jesus. Why do I have so many Jesus gags? I suppose it might be because I think about Big Picture stuff a lot (or, more accurately, just let a vague sense of worry about the Big Picture hum behind my eyes as I smear the internet into my brain); Jesus, among His many other attributes, is an excellent personification of all those existential questions, distilled into one human working-class dude with a flair for public speaking. It is very funny to me, imagining the *exasperation* a deity-in-human-form must feel when dealing with all of us normies; it is also funny to imagine Jesus in His regular-ass carpenter life (Michael Che has a great bit about this that I swear he lifted directly from my own skull. Quit poking around in my thoughts, Michael Che!). Anyhoo, here’s a bunch of Jesus jokes. (NB: This is also the second cartoon I’ve sold to the NYer that features the word “penultimate,” the first one being a sign that said “Ultimate Frisbee, 3-5PM, Penultimate Frisbee, 1- 2:30PM.” YOU’RE WELCOME.)
Johnny DiNapoli
What compels me to draw so many bird and worm cartoons? A deep, desperate scream against our productivity-obsessed society? A primal fear of death awaiting me at any moment? Perhaps I was a worm in a previous life. Or perhaps I was a bird, and I want nothing more to slip the surly bonds of Earth and return to the skies. Yes, I’m sure it’s in these thoughts the truth lives, and not that birds are just cute and funny and worms are easy to draw.
Amy Hwang
I was tired one afternoon and wanted to nap, but I also wanted to brainstorm a few cartoon ideas. This was a real dilemma for me. I messaged a friend asking if I should nap right then or in ten minutes. That inspired this cartoon. I drew a cat saying the words because it seemed more plausible and less ridiculous than an actual person (me) saying them.
Once I woke up from sleeping, and my immediate thought on waking became the caption for the cartoon below. I drew a cat saying the words because it seemed more plausible and less ridiculous than an actual person (me) saying them.
It was late one night, and I was too tired to stay up to message with a cousin in Taiwan. The reason for my tiredness was because I hadn’t taken a nap earlier in the day. I told my cousin that I regretted not napping that day, thus inspiring the caption for my cartoon below. I drew a cat saying the words because it seemed more plausible and less ridiculous than an actual person (me) saying them.
Ellis Rosen
That’s fun to say. It’s so much fun that I love putting other words in that inflection. For instance when my wife is asleep I like to yell “ARE. YOU. SLEEPING?” We have fun. It’s that announcer kind of voice that makes game show cartoons so appealing. Take any mundane question and put it in that tone and suddenly you have come up with the worst idea for a game show ever. However there’s a deeper reason I draw so many game show cartoons. It’s rooted in a deep fear that I’m constantly being judged, that every bad decision I make is being seen by hundreds of people. As if my life were being filmed in front of a live studio audience! Can you imagine a situation like that? Where anything you say can be judged by hundreds of strangers? Anywho, follow me on twitter!
Amy Kurzweil
You will recall my last week’s cartoon: a plane mid-crisis delivers, instead of an oxygen mask, a jack-in-the-box-like-puppet trailing from the upper compartment. Jacks-in-the-box (jack-in-the-boxes? jacks-in-boxes?) show up more often in my cartoons than seems reasonable given how small a role they play in my actual life or history. I think their central metaphor probably resonates with me quite a lot: you’re plodding along, humming a vaguely creepy song to yourself, ever-anticipating that something scary is going to happen and then AHH! you get an email, or someone interrupts you while you’re drawing —these are examples of terrifying things that are constantly happening to me. Or maybe it’s Jack himself I relate to? The box is the confines of the self, ever-oppressive, and rapturous are those brief moments of joyous freedom when you —email-free and uninterrupted in your drawing and writing reverie— become a scary clown in the wide open world! Surprise! Or, oops, I mean...no, yeah...this self? Yeah it’s super comfortable in here, totally great, yeah I’ll just get back in and ...uhhuh yeah, so sorry to go on and on -okay bye!
Navied Mahdavian
I have lots of cartoons playing on Shel Silverstein’s classic “The Giving Tree.” I return to often because one: I love puns (idea for future cartoon: “The Give-It-To-Me Tree”), two: trees are easy to draw (and the drawing is basically always the same), and three: it’s vaguely phallic (definitely “The Give-It-To-Me” Tree). I hadn’t noticed this last point until I was asked by The New Yorker to change the shape of the tree in the last cartoon because it looked too much like a penis. But sometimes a tree is just a tree. Except for The Giving Tree. Definitely a penis.
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