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Bob Mankoff: How About Never — Is Never Good for You

828 views · Published 10 April 2014 · 50:22 · Indexed 6 November 2026

Channel: GBH Forum Network · 2014 · Education

Harvard Book Store and The Harvard Lampoon welcomed the cartoon editor from The New Yorker Bob Mankoff for a discussion of his book How About Never—Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons.

People tell Bob Mankoff that as the cartoon editor of The New Yorker he has the best job in the world. Never one to beat around the bush, he explains to us, in the opening of this singular, delightfully eccentric book, that because he is also a cartoonist at the magazine he actually has two of the best jobs in the world. With the help of myriad images and his funniest, most beloved cartoons, he traces his love of the craft all the way back to his childhood, when he started doing funny drawings at the age of eight. After meeting his mother, we follow his unlikely stints as a high-school basketball star, draft dodger, and sociology grad student. Though Mankoff abandoned the study of psychology in the seventies to become a cartoonist, he recently realized that the field he abandoned could help him better understand the field he was in, and here he takes up the psychology of cartooning, analyzing why some cartoons make us laugh and others don't. He allows us into the hallowed halls of The New Yorker to show us the soup-to-nuts process of cartoon creation, giving us a detailed look not only at his own work, but that of the other talented cartoonists who keep us laughing week after week. For desert, he reveals the secrets to winning the magazine's caption contest. Throughout How About Never—Is Never Good for You?, we see his commitment to the motto "Anything worth saying is worth saying funny."

**This video has been edited for sound quality issues.

Bob Mankoff: How About Never — Is Never Good for You

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