"New Yorker Cartoons Go 21st Century" By Bobbi McKenna.   The all-time greatest cartoon that pretty much summed up the Internet was published in The New Yorker in 1993.  It featured a dog sitting in front of a computer.  The caption was "On the Internet no one knows you're a dog."  It pretty much summed up the virtual world we know today.   Bob Mankoff is not what you’d expect when you think "Editor from The New Yorker."

The tall and lanky Mankoff, Cartoon Editor of the New Yorker, tosses off quips with a wide lopsided-smile and a shake of his floppy, almost shoulder-length, hair.  He’s funny in a droll, “we’re-all-in-this-together kind of way.”   He’s also a hip 21st Century kind of guy, who has taken The New Yorker and its cartoons online at Cartoonbank.com and has launched cartoon caption contests.   That’s right.  Common folk like you and me get to write captions for New Yorker Cartoons.    Each week there are 5,000 to 12,000 submissions.  There’s even The New Yorker Cartoon Contest Board Game, which Mankoff says is as much a psychology game as it is a humor game.      “Humor must come from truth and pain.  It comes from some kind of anxiety.  It says, ‘Sure, there’s been a mistake, but everything’s all right.’  Humor says, ‘Don’t worry.’”   The words “The New Yorker” and “cartoon” go together like “freedom” and “the press.”   As soon as the latest issue of The New Yorker arrives in the mail, most of us flip through the pages reading the cartoons first.   Mankoff came to town this week bearing a gift that you can add to your mujst-have List.  It’s a big shiny red-covered book: “The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker.”   When he and his minions began to dig through the cartoon archives, they found carefully preserved scrapbooks with all the cartoons ever published in The New Yorker: 70,363 cartoons.   All of them could not be contained between two covers of a book unless the book was 23,454 pages long or the pages of the book were the size of barn doors.   Mankoff says that having deemed this impractical, we used the “latest advances in nanotechnology” and “teeny-weeny shoehorns” to get all 70,363 cartoons onto one DVD.   Mankoff, who has been the cartoon editor of The New Yorker since 1997, gave up work on a degree in psychology to become a cartoonist.  He submitted 10 cartoons a week to the New Yorker for two years before his first cartoon was published in 1977.    “You can’t do the talent game if you can’t take rejection.  You’ve got to show up.  It’s producing regularly.  It’s sending in 10 cartoons every week.”  He says that his mission is to train a whole new generation of cartoonists, and that he’s very accessible.    “I met a young cartoonist in North Dakota.  I saw that she had talent and told her to send her stuff in.  Now, she’s been published in the New Yorker.”   The best cartoons tell us things that can’t be said in words.  They speak directly to our unconscious.  They make us think.  They make us smile.  They make us laugh.   And the world needs more thinking, more smiling, and more laughing.

Put this book on your Gift List.   I guarantee you that if you buy it as a gift for someone else, you will end up keeping it for yourself.  It's just that good!  The friend I bought it for will never know how many laughs she's missing. Order your copy at amazon.com.