Phil
Witte and Rex Hesner. Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons.
Globe Pequot, 2024. US$29. https://www.prometheusbooks.com/9781633889804/funny-stuff/
Over the course of a breezy ten
chapters, Phil Witte and Rex Hesner draw upon a broad and deep familiarity with
the form. For years, the two have been writing an online column, “Anatomy of a
Cartoon,” to “look behind the gags to debate what makes a cartoon tick,” which
is currently hosted by CartoonStock at https://www.cartoonstock.com/blog/category/anatomy-of-a-cartoon/
. The ambition of the book is similar: to “talk about what makes single-panel
gag cartoons work, offer insights into the underlying humor, and provide a
backstage look at the profession itself.”(ix) On this front, Witte and Hesner
are quick to note a key constraint on their pursuit of this ambition—namely, to
avoid “crush[ing] the humor out of the cartoons under the weight of excess
analysis.”(ix) As they put it later, “[o]ur approach is refreshingly not
academic.”(12) There is every reason to think that Witte and Hesner have
succeeded in their aims. Their commentary is credible, lively, and
appreciative. The menu of single-panel gag cartoons (“cartoons” from here on
out) on display is wide-ranging and capably chosen. The efforts to detail the
production-side of the practice of cartooning are interesting and illuminating.
There are other books that seek to demystify the practice of cartooning—often
through more intensive autobiography and individual reflection—but Funny
Stuff engages enough cartoonists to throw cold water on the notion that
there is a single method common among cartoonists.
Like any book peppered with
Thurber, Booth, Chast, and Steinberg, the cartoon enthusiast will find
half-remembered gems brought back onto the stage. The reader who happens upon
this book with only a limited sense of the form will be treated to a survey of
pieces in the orbit of The New Yorker parceled out in a topical
ordering. Some chapters discuss formal features, touching upon the role of
captions or upon the drawing style of cartoonists. Others map out (to whatever
extent possible) the creative process of cartoon-making and idea-summoning.
Several chapters focus on the general pursuit of humor and then give pride of
place to the notion that humor stems from incongruity, which is then discussed
via a happy hodge-podge of examples. Two concluding chapters examine the extent
to which a sense of a cartoonist’s “psyche” might be on display in their oeuvre
and then take up the question of how the practice of cartooning and pantheon of
cartoonists is informed by questions around diversity and identity. Throughout,
Witte and Hesner are keen to let the voices of cartoonists shine through in the
form of judiciously chosen quotes or via concrete examples from specific
creative processes. Readers will find their general sense of the cartoon form, as
well as their critical repertoire much expanded, and, of course, they will also
have a handful of new cartoonists whose work they are eager to track down.
The most delicate audience for the
book is the diehard, the aficionado, or the connoisseur. Such a reader, if
unable to summon suitable patience, will find themselves vexed that a favorite
cartoon is omitted or that a preferred cartoonist receives insufficient (or,
heaven forbid, no) attention. As an intermittently patient reader, I was
regularly reassured by Witte and Hesner’s sense of things and, in most cases, the
usual and helpfully unusual suspects are touched upon in due course. (Even so,
I am unable to resist the urge to commend Mary Petty to those interested in
what the authors describe as “lavish” styles, and Sam Cobean as a maestro of
captionless, yet thought balloon-bearing, cartoons.)
There is a broader and perhaps
thornier sort of complaint well-versed readers might make: where are the
kindred, British cartooning voices like Pont and Fougasse? Witte and Hesner
plausibly cite The New Yorker as the center of gravity for this art form
since mid-century, but, despite this, there are ways to usefully gesture
towards the broader history of the cartoon, especially at Punch, without
collapsing into the drearily academic. Given the quality of their commentary in
this edition of the book, one expects Witte and Hesner would have valuable
observations about the differences between a quintessentially American
cartoonist like Thurber and his British counterpoint, Pont.
Early on, Witte and Hesner describe
Funny Stuff as “a tribute to a unique art form.”(ix) This is a laudable
aim, especially in what seems to be an era of declining regard for the form. Even
so, there is a tension that emerges from the conflict between, on the one hand,
the hope of extolling the virtues and power of cartoons and, on the other hand,
the project of deepening our understanding of the form. Even while Witte and Hesner
disclaim their discussion as “non-academic,” their efforts are regularly
taxonomic, intellectual, and inquisitive—e.g., partitioning out different kinds
of humor, sorting cartoonists into rough categories, and cataloguing the kinds
of interactions between drawing and caption. Due to the former aim, there is an
understandable urgency in this book to showcase as many lovely cartoons as
possible. Left unchecked, that would simply deliver another cartoon collection.
But, in keeping with the latter aim, there is a clear commitment on the part of
the authors to get to the bottom of things (as much as one might). I suspect,
however, that this can’t be done solely through attending to the good and the
excellent. This reader was unable to find a cartoon in Funny Stuff about
which the authors didn’t have a kind word. So, as awkward as it might be in
practice and as strange as it might sound in theory, I suspect this book would
have been well-served to include a handful of clunkers, coupled with Witte and Hesner’s
commentary upon them. As the authors’ discussion of the practice of cartooning
makes evident, failure—typically, in the form of cartoons rejected as leaden or
inscrutable—is an invisible yet inevitable part of the cartooning world. Partly
for this reason, in our pursuit of understanding how cartoons work, it seems
that the misfires, the duds, and the clunkers may prove no less instructive
than successes.
Then again, who wants to waste time
on bad cartoons when there are so very many good ones?
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