The ceremony’s abundance of weird tropes and traditions make it perfect fodder for wiseacre caricatures.
If people ever overheard one of the many heated conversations between Carolita Johnson and me on the subject of marriage and the wedding-industrial complex, they’d probably peg us as heartless Scrooges. But I can assure you that’s not the case—few have a bigger heart than Carolita, matched only by her enormous sense of humor, a combo that makes her the perfect person to lampoon all that is hilarious about expensive, public displays of deciding to jointly file taxes. And if you, too, have ever stifled a laugh at a drunk uncle’s twenty-minute toast, or have found yourself vacuuming in your wedding gown just to amortize your initial taffeta investment, then I suggest you check out this video on how to take that fodder and make some cartoons from it.
—Emma Allen, New Yorker humor and cartoon editor
Do you draw with your left or right hand?
Right. (I know—boring!)
What art do you have hanging on your studio walls/above your drawing desk?
On the wall facing my drafting table, I have a large painting by Michael Crawford, my late husband and fellow New Yorker cartoonist, who passed away in 2016, of a rock we used to meet at in Fort Tryon park every morning; a framed print of my “Do you have a minute for a problem whose solution has eluded humanity since the dawn of civilization?” cartoon to remind me when I’m feeling confounded that there’s work to be done in the world; a Tom Toro original of “I’m poison oak. I’m pretty sure I’m poison oak. Or is that poison oak?,” which I swapped a drawing for; and my “Lunch Hour Birds of Central Park” original.
Do you snack while you draw. If so, on what?
I can’t snack and draw at the same time—I’m too much of a klutz to have food near my drawings.
Do you listen to music or podcasts while you draw? If so, which?
I keep either NPR droning or old movies playing in the background, because music just gets me singing and/or dancing, which is not conducive to drawing. I find that old movies gently stimulate me linguistically with the funny, period slang, especially the film noir of the forties and fifties.
What object or setting do you absolutely hate drawing?
Ugh, I’m terrible at perspective, so I curse myself when I get a cartoon idea in which I need to depict streets with cars and buildings!
What’s your favorite New Yorker cartoon trope or cliché (e.g., desert island, Grim Reaper, Rapunzel tower, etc.)?
In order of preference, I love desert-island cartoons, prophet cartoons, and I love the guy crawling in the desert gasping for [insert great idea here], because they’re all basically the same in that they depict despair, and I need to find what is laughable in my own despair.
If you could have dinner with one cartoonist, living or dead, tonight, who would it be?
It would be Crawford, who I greatly miss trading humorous banter with. To paraphrase “Me and Bobby McGee,” I’d give at least one of my tomorrows for one more yesterday—maybe two! We had a lot of laughs together.
What would you serve?
For Crawford? He loved my spaghetti bolognese, with a frisée salad topped with toasted goat cheese on baguette rounds, which I jokingly called “boyfriend food,” because I started making it for him as a joke after reading a Cosmo blurb about how you could snag a man by making him a pasta dinner.
What was your favorite cartoon (strip or animation) as a kid?
It’s funny, but during my younger years I accepted Charlie Brown as the only comic strip that existed, because my dad bought me all the paperback anthologies, and I absorbed and imitated them immediately—but really just going through the motions, wondering “Why am I doing this?” Later, I became very impressed by the mysterious shmoos and the more virtuosic line drawings in “Li’l Abner,” and I think they’re what made me realize there was more to comics than cute dogs and mainstream humor.
What did you spend your first New Yorker cartoon sale check on?
The rent, baby!
If you had to get a tattoo (or new tattoo) right now, what would you get?
I sometimes have to restrain myself from getting a two-hearts-stuck-together-with-one-arrow, and on one heart it says “NEVER” and the other says “AGAIN,” because I know, if I do, I will be cursing myself to getting married again in the “famous last words tattooed on your body forever” cliché. I have a drawing of it stuck to my fridge instead.
Dogs or cats?
DOGS!
