'Dear no, Miss Mayberry--just the head'

I HAVE TO CONFESS to a certain amount of bias on my part as I begin to review this book. Except for my parents, there was no greater force on my formative years than the cartoons in the New Yorker.

This may seem a drastic statement--especially to my brothers, teachers, old friends, faithful dog and so on. But look at the evidence: One of my earliest memories is of asking my mother to explain the E.B. White/Carl Rose cartoon: "It's broccoli, dear." "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it." (That caption, by the way, is now in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.) Other memories: we are all working in the garden. Someone holds up a piece of our all-too-tenacious ivy and cries "Watch out Fred, here it comes again!" My dog announces his wish to re-enter the house. "I hear a seal bark," my father says. Friends of mine have told the tale of family dinners wherein the conversation consisted of just one cartoon caption after another--punctuated, always, by uncontrollable laughter.

I would not be making fools of my family and myself in this shameless manner if I did not feel the end result somehow worthwhile. For this enjoyment-in-excelsis of rectangular portions of a slick weekly magazine comes about only as a result of a particular view of the world: that people are basically crazy, and that the only way to survive at all is through laughter. This philosophy has been carried through the centuries by the likes of Chaucer, Sheridan, Twain and Beerbohm. For the past fifty years the cartoonists in The New Yorker have espoused it, and have presented our frailties to us with wit, grace and, most of all, total disrespect for the supposed importance of our lives.

This fiftieth anniversary Album of Drawings (an overly pretentious title for a not-at-all middle-aged collection) juxtaposes Booth, Lorenz, Saxon and Koren with Thurber, Arno, Hokinson and Irvin, along with William Steig, Charles Addams and Whitney Darrow, to chronicle a half century of the idiosyncracies of the American species. If some of the cartoons seem to depend too heavily on the actual social conditions of their time, we can rely on our memories and our knowledge of human nature to see their humor.

But so many of them need no such transposition. The collection was chosen with timelessness in mind; there are duplications from the 1950 25th Anniversary Album, but many of the most dated old cartoons are gone. Into this category fall, unfortunately, most of John Held Jr.'s flapper drawings, Gluyas Williams's genius-inspired portrayals of crises in American Industry--based, all of them, alas, on now obsolete advertising campaigns. (I still believe that the sight of the rotund executive being forcibly restrained from plunging after the bar of Ivory in "The Day a Cake of Soap Sank at Proctor and Gamble" is one of the funniest sights ever, but I must agree that a case can be made for obscurity there). And the late 1930s parody, "Life goes to the fall of Western Civilization," is gone too. You had to know the old Life style to laugh at it, but it was so good.

TO CALL ALL these old cartoons mere nostalgia pieces is to deny that old ladies still might comment to each other "I love driving. It gives me such a sense of power," as they did in an early 40s Helen Hokinson; that a young woman might peek into a mirror and say to her reflection "Boo! You pretty creature" as in a late 20s Peter Arno; or that these situations might strike a responsive chord in any of our lives.

The real danger to the enjoyment of these cartoons are among those who would analyze them--the bewailings of the falling-off of the cartoon market after the demise of the Saturday Evening Post, the endless discussions over drawing versus captions, even, God forbid, analytical tracings of artistic styles--they all glut the air and remove these cartoons into some sort of exalted humorless nether-region. The Saturday Evening Post had lousy cartoons (e.g. Hazel); drawings and captions balance each other out just fine; and no, I don't think Charles Addams is indebted to Salvador Dali.

To talk about all 93 cartoonists in this volume would be boring and futile. They are all funny. My personal favorites are Price, Koren, and of course, Thurber. Too much has been written on Thurber to make it worth going into him here, but most of his great work was done for The New Yorker, and it fits better into this collection than it does into Thurber anthologies. I like Price's angular bodies and Koren's furry ones; my roommate likes Booth's cats; and Hilton Kramer thinks Steinberg is the only decent one among them all.

I HAVE A CLOSE friend who was diagnosed a few weeks ago as having arthritis in her knees. This, compounded with her ulcer, her bursitis and her migraine headaches began to make her feel as though she would be nothing but a mass of decaying ectoplasm by the age of 40. I lent her this book, and in the depths of her depression she opened it and immediately began to howl with laughter. The cartoon she first turned to was by Ross: a football player runs towards a touchdown, shouting to the cheering crowd "Hey, fans! I've got a separated shoulder and a broken rib, but nothing can stop me! Right?" She laughed for days.

That's the amazing thing about this book--the same as the Saturday passing of the magazine around the lunch table. A cartoonist we've never met has caught the sense of our habits and quirks with a quick sketch and a line of prose. "Here's one for you," the saying goes--I've heard it and said it a thousand times.