Robert Mankoff Quotes & Sayings

“One question about a joke is, how well is the strangeness of the situation resolved? At 'The New Yorker', we retain a lot of incongruity, tapping the playful part of the mind - Monty Python-type stuff. We also try to use humor as a vehicle for communicating ideas. Not editorial comment, but observation.”

“Each cartoon needs the right amount of wrong.”

“I don't think most people know what's going to be in their obituary, but I do.”

“Cartoons are like fruit flies. Biologists use fruit flies because their large chromosomes and short life cycle make them ideal for studying hereditary changes.”

“The line between humor and bad taste is your audience, in which some people will find everything offensive, and some people will find nothing offensive, but the truth is that most humor originates in what would be called bad taste.”

“Humor levels the playing field. I understood that early on - that was something I had.”

“I was the founder of the 'Cartoon Bank' in the '90s. I was interested in finding ways for cartoonists to supplement their incomes.”

“I'm pretty adept with computers and Photoshop for my blog, and I found my style with a conversational voice and an image-ready column.”

“There are no cartoons about happy marriages.”

“There's public humor, and there's private humor, and they're all appropriate in their own way, and you shouldn't - just as you wouldn't have a megaphone and say certain things that you would say around your friends - things that are perfectly all right within your close social group with whom you share a certain context.”