CAPTION: “I really don’t have any special requests. I just wanted to write about the experience.”
Credit: New Yorker cartoon by Donald Reilly
Archives for posts with tag: New Yorker cartoon
CAPTION: Is there a doctor of literature in the house?
CREDIT: New Yorker cartoon by Michael Maslin, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at condenaststore.com.
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” STEPHEN KING
Illustration: New Yorker cartoon by Charles Barsotti, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CREDIT: New Yorker cartoon by Leo Cullum, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at condenaststore.com.
CAPTION: “If I hire you to find my husband, will you turn some lights on in your office?”
CREDIT: New Yorker cartoon by Ward Sutton, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at condenaststore.com.
CAPTION: “If he was really intelligent, he wouldn’t limit his applications to East Coast schools.”
CREDIT: New Yorker cartoon by Danny Shanahan, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Cartoonist Matt Diffee offers insight into the creative process by explaining how he developed his “Skywriter’s Block” cartoon. (Read the entire article at the New Yorker.)
I started by jotting down the words “writer’s block.”…I started by playing with those words. First I thought of alternative meanings of the words themselves. So “writer’s block” could be a city block where writers live. It could be writers playing with children’s building blocks, or a football block performed by a writer. You can see there’s probably a joke to be had among those options, but I don’t think it would be a very good one. Might be more “punny” than funny.
You could mess around with the “writer” part of the phrase, too, and make it “rider’s block.” You could take that as far as you wanted and get “horse-rider’s block” or “subway-rider’s block.” I don’t think I pursued that angle very much.
I mostly thought in terms of replacing the “writer” with another occupation. I jotted down things like “dentist’s block,” “taxidermist’s block,” “proctologist’s block,” “ventriloquist’s block,” and then a bunch of occupations that end in “-er” like “plumber’s block” and “butcher’s block” (which has its own punny potential).
In the end, I found the gag by adding words to the phrase. Where can you add words to it? In the middle? Not really. At the end? “Writer’s block and tackle.” “Writer’s blockade.” At the beginning? Sure, “copywriter’s block,” “grant-writer’s block,” then eventually I came to “skywriter’s block” and BAM, there’s the idea…
CREDIT: New Yorker cartoon by Matt Diffee, all rights reserved
CREDIT: New Yorker cartoon by Harry Bliss, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at condenaststore.com.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Instead of Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, this werewolf father reads the lycanthrope version.
CAPTION: “I’m looking for a book by T. What’s-His-Face Boyle.”
CREDIT: New Yorker cartoon by Mick Stevens, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at condenaststore.com.
CAPTION: “But when she got there, the cupboard was bare, and so the poor dog had none.”
CREDIT: New Yorker cartoon by Mike Twohy, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at condenast.com.
Silver Birch Press 