Published in the print edition of the December 30, 2019, issue, with the headline “A Funny Thing Happened.” Emma Allen is The New Yorker’s cartoon editor and edits humor pieces on newyorker… ♦For a holiday respite from the news cycle, we’ve brought together archival gems, fresh comics, and a cartoon crossword. The New Yorker. Ever wanted to know what Nine and a half decades ago, Ross had this to say about the publication he was planning: “It will hate bunk.” Of late, bunk has irrefutably been on the rise; the antidote, now as then, is humor. “I think the boundaries between specific types of comedy and specific types of comics are breaking down,” she says, which has meant that the submission process is no longer “just this endless game of presenting work and then hearing ‘yes’ or ‘no’—and instead it’s been, ‘How can we adapt this into something else we can use?’”New regular features online have also allowed the magazine to be “hyper-responsive” to current events, particularly important when “there’s just so much to respond to and satirize in the world of politics.” Still, it has been a balancing act mediating the imperative to “lampoon people in power” and simply offer readers a reprieve from it all.Allen herself is the only one who doesn’t get a break, living and breathing a daily comedy variety show, from the podcasts she listens to on her morning commute to the stand-up specials she watches before bed. Join to Connect. Yale University. Besides, who couldn’t use a laugh break from this whiplash-inducing carnival ride of a news cycle?So, as you settle in for fireside holiday rants from your bunky uncle, we hope you enjoy this issue. (Tip: in its printed form, it can be rolled up and used as a low-impact weapon.) The ratio of pictures to words should satisfy even the most literacy-averse. It is true, though, that the most popular cocktail-party confession that I, the cartoon editor, solemnly receive and usually absolve is that someone “reads” Yes, you read that correctly. Emma Allen Editorial Staff at The New Yorker Brooklyn, New York 263 connections. You guessed it—the Cartoon Department.To that end, we’ve thumbed through the archives, rummaged around in editors’ waste bins, and peered into the space behind my desk where important things tend to fall, and we’ve pasted together something resembling a magazine. It includes such treasures as a 1997 piece by John Updike on his youthful aspirations to be a gag cartoonist (judge for yourselves); cartoon-inflected fiction and poetry; cartoons about cartooning; musings on early animation; and comics by Liana Finck, Emily Flake, Ebony Flowers, and Emma Hunsinger. And who happened to be napping under a desk when the office was being securely locked up for the winter break? Every last one of the serious adult types at this publication is off mulling some wine, trimming a tree, roasting a chestnut, taking in a matinée of “Little Women,” lighting a candle, putting out a candle-related fire, or catching up on back issues of verbose periodicals. (Look at you—still bothering with all these words!)
‘Stupid’ sometimes is … Cartoon by Caldwell Tanner / drawn for Allen when she started at In her unprecedented role overseeing much of the publication’s humor content, Allen has already expanded its breadth and potential to accommodate new voices, building up Daily Shouts, Daily Cartoon online, video series, and podcasts, alongside her standard-form duties as cartoon editor. There is no secret formula for making the cut, but as she sees it, the essential categories for the classic gags are “gimlet-eyed observational things” and “things that are just totally dada and surreal and come from the minds of madmen.”As a relative newcomer keen to minimize the well-known pain of being edited, her Allen’s interest in experimenting with new formats online, from longer-form cartoons to moving image and even augmented reality, plays into the rise of a new generation of comic jacks-of-all-trades.