It’s funny that, a couple days after my post about meeting your teachers, I read this story in the New Yorker. It’s a story by Jonathan Lethem about two bookstore employees who travel to the small town in which their hero, an obscure and seemingly out-of-fashion author lives. Beware the racy drawing that accompanies the story; it is not as racy as the story itself.

I certainly hope I don’t have to go through the kind of ordeal the characters in this story do to meet my favorite cartoonists, but maybe that’s par for the course.

Does a life of telling stories make a person crazy, or do you have to be born crazy to want to make a living that way? It’s a timeless question.

My friend Ian got me a wonderful book full of rejected cartoons from the New Yorker. These are cartoons, from the New Yorker‘s usual stable of cartoonists, that for one reason or another failed to make the cut. They are still very funny; in some cases, they’re funnier than what actually made it into the magazine. At the beginning of each cartoonist’s section, there is a two-page spread of questions and answers. I thought, being a cartoonist who gets rejected, why not fill their questions out myself? Below are my answers. New Yorker, take note.

Occasionally two cartoonists will come up with the same idea independent of each other.  A variation of this happened to me recently, when a cartoonist for the New Yorker came up with a joke very similar to a Falling Rock strip I drew two years ago.  Here’s my Yorick-the-cow joke:

And here is Zachary Kanin’s:

The only similarity here is the line from Hamlet (The oft-misquoted “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him“) being used on the skull of a cow.  The punchlines are not the same, nor is the drawing style.

I was surprised when I came across Mr. Kanin’s Yorick joke.  It didn’t seem like an obvious connection to me when I wrote it, so the fact that another cartoonist thought of it as well means there’s something there.  I was also flattered in a weird way; I am at least as clever as a New Yorker cartoonist.

I’m not going to sue, New Yorker lawyers.  Don’t worry your pretty little heads.  What I will do is put forth the same deal I gave to the writers of the NBC show Community when they used a joke I thought of first: hire me!  I’d make a great staff cartoonist.  Think it over, make me an offer.

Now I’ll get back to writing jokes you’ll see in the New Yorker two years from now.