Mick Hartley

Arts & Letters Daily link to this little piece on How to read the New Yorker in 10 easy steps – which prompts me to air my New Yorker complaint: the poor quality of the cartoons nowadays.

My father had The New Yorker Album: cartoons from 1925 – 1950, which I loved, and still possess. Compared to, say, Punch, the humour seems as fresh as ever – like this classic from the late Twenties:

I suppose James Thurber was the big name – “It’s a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.” Or the barking seal:

I realise that it’s hardly fair to pull out a few contemporary efforts to compare with the old classics, so I won’t bother linking. If you’re interested here’s the New Yorker website. (Oh go on then: from the latest issue try the one on this page, or here, or here.)

I’ve got no strong feelings about the articles themselves, and wouldn’t presume to judge how the magazine as a whole compares now to the old days, but whenever I come across their cartoons during the course of an article I’m inevitably struck by how weak they are. It’s possible that US and British tastes in cartoons have drifted apart – plenty of cartoons in Private Eye, for instance, make me laugh – but I don’t think so. I just think they’re crap cartoons.