Phil Witte, ’83, Talks About Book on Cartoon Criticism in UChicago Magazine
Lawyer jokes
The single-panel gag cartoon is “unique in the world of humor,” Phil Witte, JD’83, and Rex Hesner write in Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons (Prometheus Books, 2024). The genre is astonishingly spare: a single drawing, usually black and white, with a supershort caption—or no caption at all. And yet, they argue, “no other form of humor delivers the goods with such immediacy.”
Funny Stuff is not a how-to book, although its close analysis could serve as a road map for aspiring cartoonists (and if any of them become famous, “we won’t hesitate to take partial credit,” Witte and Hesner write). It’s more like a guide for deepening your cartoon appreciation—perhaps even becoming a cartoon connoisseur.
Funny Stuff grew out of a blog, Cartoon Companion. Hesner started it, then Witte joined in once they discovered their shared love of the genre. (Witte met Hesner, a jazz musician, at a neighbor’s party in Piedmont, California; at the time they lived a few houses apart.) In the blog they dissected, in obsessive detail, the cartoons in each issue of the New Yorker. Soon the cartoonists themselves were reading the blog, as was Bob Mankoff, who served as the magazine’s cartoon editor for two decades.
When Mankoff left the New Yorker and later became the head of the licensing site CartoonStock, he invited Witte and Hesner to write for it. That blog, Anatomy of a Cartoon, still appears sporadically. It was Mankoff who suggested that Witte and Hesner write a book together. He even supplied the foreword for Funny Stuff.
The book, Witte says, takes “an analytical approach, like a lawyer I guess,” while keeping a light tone so as not to kill the funny. It includes more than 100 cartoons (most licensed from CartoonStock) that many readers will recognize by the artists’ styles if not by their names: Charles Addams, Roz Chast, Emily Flake, Sam Gross, William Haefeli, Bruce Kaplan.
Funny Stuff also includes two cartoons by Witte himself. In 2012—living out the daydreams of untold numbers of lawyers—he quit his law job of three decades to become a full-time freelance cartoonist. He’s published work in the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, the New Statesman, and the Times (London), among others.
In chapter 7, one of Witte’s cartoons serves as an example of the “good news/bad news” gag. “You can afford to retire at 65,” a smiling financial adviser tells a middle-aged man, “but you’ll need to die at 70.” In chapter 8, Witte contributes a captionless cartoon to the debate about whether abstract paintings are art.
Read more at The University of Chicago Magazine