This past gift-giving season, one of the things I received was a desk calendar made up of cartoons from the New Yorker. At first, I thought that was kind of cool. I’ve never been exposed to the New Yorker in my normal life, so the idea of being able to see a full 365 cartoons from it seemed like fun. Then I began reading them, and I stumbled across a rather unfortunate yet unsurprising realization: the New Yorker isn’t funny. At all.
Now I realize that not every single comic can be funny. Comic writers – especially ones for a magazine or newspaper – have a lot of work they have to churn out very quickly. Not every single thing can be gold. I also understand that not everyone can be a Bill Watterson (of Calvin & Hobbes fame). That’s fine. Not every author can be Alexandre Dumas or Terry Pratchett, but there are still a huge amount of massively good authors out there. But, somehow, despite all of the benefit of the doubt I can possibly give the writers of the New Yorker comics, they remain completely and utterly unfunny.
I say this not as a man who last looked at two or three and made his decision, but as a man who has read the offerings for the entire month of January and the first two days of February, as well as flipping around in the stack in utter disbelief. I’m not sure if I could ever do these justice, so therefore here are the actual images, scanned (though at weird angles and not in date order), complete with my thoughts, all after the jump! Continue reading
