Thursday, midday. Paul Noth is in Milwaukee, where he moved back after 20 years split between the Upper East Side and the Princeton area, and where he now has, as he put it while wandering to another room mid-stream to chase better WiFi, multiple rooms. (We get it, Paul. You don’t live in Manhattan anymore.) First order of business: it’s Noth, rhymes with both. He’s been letting people say “Nawth” for decades out of Midwestern politeness. Gosh. Consider yourselves corrected on his behalf. If you missed it live, the replay is above. Here’s what happened, with every link we promised on air down the bottom… Pre-orderers get a signed bookplate posted to them! Just shoot him an email at paul@paulnoth.com with your mailing address and your desired inscription. (A proof-of-purchase screenshot is also much appreciated.) You know Paul’s most famous cartoon even if you don’t know his name: the flock of sheep gazing up at a billboard of a wolf, captioned “He tells it like it is.” It’s among the most shared cartoons in the magazine’s history; it’s now the cover of his book, and Paul has mixed feelings about its immortality. “It should be a historical document by now,. he said, a little wearily. Here’s the detail that should be laminated and handed to every rejected cartoonist on earth: The New Yorker rejected it the first time he submitted it. So did they reject his other most popular cartoons, first time ‘round. Paul resubmits. He always has, fortified by a story he’d heard about Saul Steinberg, who supposedly used to take his rejected cartoons, put them straight into a fresh envelope, and post them back to the magazine. (The balls on this guy! I love him.) Paul sold to The New Yorker in 2004. The cartoon: a White House press secretary holding a torch under his chin like a kid telling a ghost story, while a reporter asks how he responds to critics who say he’s just trying to scare people. He’d worked on that batch for the best part of 2 months under the wing of Matt Diffee, whom he’d met at the Rejection Show and who walked the batch in to Bob Mankoff. At Paul’s first look meeting, surrounded by his heroes (Gahan Wilson among them), Mankoff greeted the new arrival with two sentences that became his entire art education. The first: “Don’t get cocky.” The second: “I want to see 10 a week from you, even if they’re s**t.” Paul has done 10 a week ever since, through every all-nighter, every TV job, every book. “It was my art school in a lot of ways,” he said. Like me, he’d never been to one. He’d never had art in public before. He learned to draw in public, 10 at a time, and eventually stripped away his early etching-style hatch marks when he realised the truth every gag cartoonist arrives at eventually: “The best style for me was the best execution of the joke.” Or as Lee Lorenz put it in The Art of the New Yorker, which we both worship: a cartoon is beautiful the way a sailboat is beautiful. It has exactly what it needs to function, and nothing else. Mankoff gave me my version of that lecture too, around 2014, back when I wore a suit jacket to the offices like I was auditioning for a bank. He looked at my batch of borrowed styles and asked what I think about when I do my hair in the morning. “Try and think about your drawings as your hairdo. It’s a style you’ve arrived at. You’re not trying to copy Johnny Depp.” This from a man with famously luxurious amounts of hair. It worked, though. It worked on both of us. The Pale Force story is even better than I’d hoped. Jim Gaffigan, it turns out, is Paul’s brother-in-law; he’d married Paul’s sister a year or two before. Paul, not yet a New Yorker cartoonist, pitched Jim an animated bit for Late Night with Conan O’Brien, modelled on Steve Martin turning up to Letterman with something weird in his back pocket. When the head writer asked whether he’d done animation before, Paul said yes. (He had made flip books, so… technically not a lie?) The budget was roughly what a guest gets paid for sitting on the couch, which is not a number that produces animation, and his first delivery came back with the note that a 16-megabyte video file cannot be broadcast on network television. The night the first episode aired, running on no sleep, he watched it freeze for a single millisecond and briefly died. Then it killed, the series got Emmy-nominated, and Paul got a comedy education by osmosis: Robert Smigel, Brian Stack and Demetri Martin down the hall, Conan’s face providing the biggest laugh of every episode no matter what Paul animated. His conclusion, having vowed never to do low-budget animation again: Worth it. The Laureate Report… I put the important questions to Wisconsin’s inaugural Cartoonist Laureate, and I can now report the following to the people. There is no salary. There is no diplomatic immunity. There is, crucially, no sash: “I have to make the sash myself, apparently. Like a Mayor McCheese-style sash.” His opening list of demands included full access to the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. His actual duties, in his own words: “to figure out what the hell the cartoonist laureate does.” So far that means cartoon classes for kids, library outreach, trying to attach a cash prize for whoever comes next (”that’s what cartoonists actually need let’s be real”), and a retrospective of 175 of his originals opening at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in January, sharing a title with the book. When the museum’s president first floated the laureateship, Paul assumed she meant Lynda Barry, P.S. Mueller or Craig Thompson. She meant him. His process, for the process junkies: 10 ideas written first thing every morning, “usually bad”, purely to switch on the part of the brain that notices things. Voice memos through the day, transcribed the next morning. And this, which made my week: Paul had listened to Tuesday’s episode with Brian Biggs and co-signed the boredom sermon. “If I keep the stimulus away, I just keep things mentally kind of quiet; I will start entertaining myself after a while.” Three episodes ago this was my crank theory. It is now, I’m declaring, the official position of the show. Somewhere in here Matt Diffee himself materialised in the chat, speak of the devil, and was informed we’d been blaming everything wrong in Paul’s life on him. For the record: Diffee ushered in a whole generation of cartoonists, Paul among them, and his Rejection Collection books are the sacred texts of everything above. Paul’s dad was a lifelong newspaper man who brought home cartoon collections from the feature desk for his cartoon-obsessed kid, and who gave him one piece of career advice: don’t go into print media. He could see the writing on the wall. So Paul didn’t pursue it. He tried screenplays, plays, other lives. “I look back at an old notebook where I was trying to write a screenplay,” he said, “and the margins are just full of cartoons. In retrospect, it should have been obvious.” At the end, Paul described what this show apparently is: “It’s basically like a digital cartoonist lunch.” The magazine’s cartoonists used to eat together every Tuesday. We don’t anymore. I suppose I’ve been rebuilding the table an hour at a time, and I couldn’t be happier about who keeps sitting down at it. Now, the promised links… Pre-order I Am Going to Eat You... and Other Awkward Truths Out 13 October, 200+ of his most-loved cartoons plus 50 never published, and Paul says the unpublished ones “are usually the funniest ones, to be honest”. Pre-orderers get a signed bookplate posted to them! Just shoot him an email at paul@paulnoth.com with your mailing address and your desired inscription. (A proof-of-purchase screenshot is also much appreciated.) Pre-orders are everything in publishing now, so if you were going to buy it anyway, buying it today is the whole ballgame. And since our books share a birthday: pre-order You’re Not a Real Parent Until... (👉 Pre-order here ) Oh! —and I’ll draw your kids, or grandkids, into the book! ‘til next time!Your pal, PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newyorkcartoons.com/subscribe
