Last Thursday, we had the pleasure of picking the brain of Bob Mankoff, the witty and wonderful cartoon editor of The New Yorker. Here are just a few valuable lessons he taught us throughout the day:
- Bad things might not be good, but at least they can be funny. No one writes comics about perfectly happy marriages or laughs on a day when nothing goes wrong, right?
- You don’t always have to take “no” for an answer. It is possible, for example, to become cartoon editor at a magazine that once rejected your work hundreds of times.
- Seriously… It’s okay to fail once or twice! Bob tried his hand at welfare work, taught speed reading, and got kicked out of an experimental psychology program before he started selling cartoons, and he turned out just fine.
- Don’t let anyone trick you into thinking that we’re all “going to hell in a hand basket.” People are constantly working to improve their surroundings and the world is getting better every day.
- When you’re working in the funny business, you’re bound to offend someone at some point in time. In fact, you’ll probably offend lots of people all the time, but who really cares? You can get offended at the offense, starting a vicious cycle of embitterment, or you can just laugh a little and trust that you’re all going to move on with your lives.
A warm “thank you” goes out to all those who were involved in Thursday’s events! We’d love to hear about what you learned from Bob Mankoff and we hope you’ll join us for our next event: a Q&A and reading with Ainsfield-Wolf Book Award-winning poet Adrian Matejka on Thursday, November 13th.
