Quotes from Robert Mankoff

Each cartoon needs the right amount of wrong.

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

Primitive, naive drawing can also be good drawing but it's hard to pull off. I don't think most submitters realize that.

Humor is basically a cognitive process. And it's a creative process not only on the part of the cartoonist but on the part of the viewer.

I do find that humor helps in relationships. It certainly helps in my marriage now because I'm a very, very fallible person. And if I wasn't funny I'd be kicked right out the door.

I'm making fun of myself and I think I'm making fun of all men in our desperate, desperate attempt to understand the people we're with and hopefully through humor have them understand us.

The generations that were exposed to sitcom have the people actually saying the line, saying the joke, whereas sort of before that you have much more observational humor.

I am a 'made' cartoonist, but I was born a comic.

There is humor that's just whimsy, that we smile at, but the humor that we laugh at, someone has to be - someone's dignity has to be reduced.

We've created a safe, nonjudgemental environment that will leave your child ill-prepared for real-life.

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.

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

You do have to put in a lot time to get good at anything and than includes cartoons. So I think it's true of art and everything else.

I'm very fond of the strictly visual cartoons I did when I was breaking in in the 1970's. Over time I migrated to a more verbal approach.

Cartoonists create so many cartoons on any given topic that we can follow the life cycle of a comic idea and how it evolves over time more quickly than we can with a form like the novel.

I will pick a raft of cartoons. And then later, it'll come time to run this cartoon. And I'll look at it, and I won't quite get it anymore. Because sometimes the grenade goes off in the moment, and then it doesn't repeat down the line.

One of the first comic things you do is imitate.

The interesting thing about humor is that in humor, you - in logic, something is A or not A. In humor, it's both A and not A.

Professional humorists and cartoonists have to go through a stage in which they have to kill their own internal editor just so they can get stuff out. So whether they believe it or not, they need me on the other end to do that editing for them.

'The New Yorker' didn't invent the magazine cartoon, but it did really establish it.

The most offensive thing that ever occurred in 'The New Yorker' would be, like, the mildest thing at a Chris Rock concert.

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.

As a cartoonist I do what I find funny. As an editor I have a broader approach realizing that humor is inherently subjective and I don't want my preferences to rule out what others might like.

I know everybody wants humor to be subversive and speak truth to power. I don't think power's been listening, incidentally.