I am not alone in saying this about The New Yorker: “I always look at the cartoons first.” Cartooning is about observation and reflection—regardless of gender, we can all observe and reflect, sometimes in very funny ways. Comedy and humor stand on their own merits, and cartoonists are not reliant on chromosomes to produce a good gag. Yet cartooning, like so many art forms, was too often a male-dominated field.
Liza Donnelly has been a contributing gag cartoonist for The New Yorker for 40 years. She has authored two books of history on women in the cartoon world. Now, a documentary film on the horizon is seeking additional funding on Kickstarter. Women Laughing is about the women cartoonists of The New Yorker, past and present, “and the power of their work to help us see differently.” With less than two weeks left to contribute, I asked Donnelly to talk about her inspiration and practice of cartooning, the role that The New Yorker cartoon has played in entertaining us readers, and why we always look at all the cartoons first.
Liza, you are the author of Funny Ladies, a history of the women cartoonists at The New Yorker from 1925–2005, and a sequel, Very Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Women Cartoonists. Is this film documentary an extension of the book, or a totally different experience?
My publisher agreed to publish a sequel in 2022 called Very Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Women Cartoonists, with two new chapters, and a foreword by David Remnick (editor-in-chief) and Emma Allen (cartoon editor). The documentary is indeed an extension of the book, and will have some about the past, but it will be a totally different experience. In the documentary, I want to go deep in conversation with contemporary women cartoonists and talk about the creative process and what motivates them. I also want to know from them if they believe their work can have an impact on change. Also, I plan to draw with my colleagues!
I’m fascinated by the history and the present of The New Yorker cartoons. What was going on in The New Yorker that inspired you to become a cartoonist? Was it that it was such a rare venue for women humorists?
My parents got The New Yorker and my mother loved James Thurber, so at a very young age I copied his drawings. It made her happy and I was hooked. I grew up in Washington, DC, during a tumultuous time in our country, and it made me want to do something with my drawing ability—I was attracted to Ben Shahn, Gary Trudeau, Brad Holland, Ed Sorel and other political artists. My artistic influences straddled humor and activism, and when I was in college I realized that The New Yorker had political cartoons—in a New Yorker sort of way. I found that interesting—it was a quieter way to express political and cultural ideas, which suited my personality better. So I began submitting to The New Yorker during college; it wasn’t until two years after I graduated that I sold one. I was well-aware I was in the minority as a woman in cartooning, particularly being only one of four women drawing cartoons for The New Yorker in 1979. I was a feminist (and still am, of course) but didn’t think about gender too much; I felt that just being a cartoonist was a feminist “statement.” I just wanted to be a cartoonist. It was later on that I started to investigate why more women didn’t draw cartoons, and that led to writing Funny Ladies.
Mary Petty and Helen Hokinson were kind of household names (at least in my home). What was it about their humor that caught on to readers?
Those two wonderful artists had very unique drawing styles. Mary Petty was self-taught and Helen Hokinson classically trained; but they both had a keen eye for humor. As far as we know, Mary wrote her own ideas, whereas Helen worked with a writer, James Reid Parker. What they had in common I think is that their characters were so relatable. I also think that since they both did covers for The New Yorker (not all cartoonists did), they got more famous because of that.
Who were some of the other women with ink-stained hands?
Barbara Shermund is perhaps my favorite cartoon artist from the early New Yorker. She was very funny in a snarky kind of way—she almost seemed like a flapper to me—and her drawing style was breezy and loose. She was classically trained (so many were back then), but she used her abilities to splash beautiful figures and tell stories on a page. Her ideas/captions also had a unique feminist tone.
You have a great roster of current talent. And it is sobering to see the old photos of the old boys’ club of cartoonists, as you show in the video, compared with the gender diversity today. Was there a prejudice against women, per se, or were women just not doing much humor until 40 years ago when you began?
I don’t believe there was a prejudice towards women at The New Yorker in the early years. But like so many other places, prejudice creeped in in the 1940s and ’50s, extended to the 1970s. With the cultural changes after the second wave of Feminism, things got a little better, but humor had become so misogynistic! It took time to turn that around. With those changes, and a new cartoon editor in 1973—a cartoonist named Lee Lorenz, who was open to new ways to express humor—slowly the numbers of women drawing cartoons increased bit by bit. He and senior editor William Shawn brought me and Roz Chast on board in the late 1970s, and a few others in the 1980s.
I remember when M.G. Lord broke the gender ceiling in editorial cartoons. Do you feel that you and Roz Chast did similar ceiling-breaking for gag cartoons?
Well, the ceiling had been broken—or cracked, perhaps—for us in 1925 by Ethel Plummer, the first woman who drew a cartoon for The New Yorker in the first issue. And I would say that perhaps the editorial cartooning ceiling was similarly cracked by the women who drew cartoons for Suffrage in the early 1900s. Both fields, editorial and single panel, got worse for women midcentury, so we had to do more breaking in the 1970s and ’80s.
Were women in past or present New Yorker also getting gags from gag writers?
Some cartoonists did use writers in the past, not all. Now some do also. When I started out in the 1970s, using a writer was sort of frowned upon. The idea was that you were supposed to have a voice, not illustrate a joke.
Is there a fundamental difference in cartoon wit between any gender identity?
Nope. Not at all.
The New Yorker has, for most its history, had male cartoon editors (and male chief editors selecting the offerings). How has that gender imbalance impacted cartoons and cartoonists?
Now we have a woman cartoon editor, Emma Allen. I think her appointment may have encouraged more women to submit cartoons to The New Yorker, and that helped change the gender imbalance. I have interviewed Emma and she says she doesn’t really pay attention to what gender a cartoonist is when selecting what she thinks is funny. You also don’t always know what a person’s gender is anyway, so she and David [Remnick] select what they think is funny.
For me personally, I believe it’s important to check unconscious bias at the door when deciding if something is funny or not. The humor may be unfamiliar to you, it may be about a lived experience you haven’t had—but that doesn’t mean it’s not funny. That’s what I am trying to get at: Humor is based on personal experience, and when creating, we try to find our commonality and laugh together. Does that make sense?
Totally! What do you want the viewers to take away from this film?
I want to show the creative process in a deeper way than has been done in other documentaries. I want to shine a spotlight on this strange and wonderful artform, show how it tells us about ourselves as humans, while it tells us about the lives of the women who drew/draw the cartoons. Cartoons are a great way to talk about needed change in our society, and women are doing just that in their drawings. I want to explore that and share what I find with viewers. I will be drawing with the cartoonists as we talk, so the documentary will really try to show how it all works.