New Yorker Cartoon Editor Emma Allen on How to Be Funny in the Age of Instagram, VR, and Donald Trump
It’s an article of faith in literary circles that the proper way to read the New Yorker is to start with the cartoons and then place the magazine atop a neat pile of older issues and wait for nuclear winter to free up time to read the rest. Ever since the New Yorker’s first issue hit newsstands in 1925, these cartoons—cosmopolitan, sly, absurdist, and sometimes obscure—have been a treasured part of America’s visual culture, knitting together aspirating sophisticates across the country by letting them in on a multifarious common joke and a shared style of laughing at the world, through good times and bad. Over the past near-century, great cartoonists left their mark on the magazine’s pages and moved on—but very little about the cartoons themselves changed.
Now, since May, these cartoons are in the nimble hands of a new cartoon editor, the 29-year-old humor wünderkind Emma Allen. And the times they are a-changin.
A journalist who got her professional start at Artinfo, where she worked alongside several current artnet News editors and evinced an arrestingly funny style covering everything from Katy Perry’s album designs to Bravo’s “Work of Art” reality show, Allen moved over to the New Yorker five and a half years ago and clambered up the masthead, first taking over the written humor sections and now the cartoons. A key to her success at the magazine has been her digital savvy, and, since she began, the New Yorker’s online humor has become a big part of its business. Now she is poised to continue this web migration with the cartoons, with wide-reaching implications for their many fans. Soon, we may be able to indulge in theNew Yorker’s cartoons before we read anything whatsoever.