Roz Chast on George Booth’s Cartoons

There’s almost nothing I like more than a laughing fit. It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm or a sneeze. I wish I could say that only the comedies of Aristophanes make me laugh, but then my pants would catch on fire. I have cracked up at bons mots, but also at dirty jokes, dumb pets, and all sorts of things I “shouldn’t” laugh at. Someone recently told me a joke that involved the pun “a frayed knot,” and I laughed like a lunatic. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. Laughing is laughing.

I’ve always loved cartoons. I liked to draw and write as a child, and cartooning entails both. Charles Addams hit me like a meteor when I was around nine years old, and I have a particular affection for the great George Booth. He entered the world in 1926, the year after The New Yorker was founded, and enlivened its pages for more than fifty years. One quality shared by my favorite cartoons, and always by Booth’s, is that they come from a specific visual and comic world and capture a distinct point of view. They aren’t merely a gag line that could be illustrated by anyone (not that some gag lines aren’t good).

In the best cartoons, the words and the drawings are conjoined. Booth’s drawings, even without captions, are hilarious. Men and women, cats and dogs, electrical outlets and bathtubs: each detail cracks me up. His characters’ faces are always funny to me, especially their mouths when they’re talking. I remember telling a friend about a Booth cartoon featuring bags of groceries, feral dogs, and a parking lot, and I could not get the words out—I was laughing too hard.

Another Booth cartoon that kills me shows a couple arriving at a yard sale where the merchandise is spread out all over the yard. Every object is lovingly drawn, in a way that only Booth could draw them. Every detail enhances the scene.

But the Booth cartoon that I adore as much as it is possible to adore a cartoon is a two-pager titled “Ip Gissa Gul.” Set in prehistoric times and focussed on an ape searching for a mate, it is absolutely ridiculous and inventive. No one had drawn a cartoon like it before. No one will draw another one like it. When people talk about what a New Yorker cartoon is, I always think of this one, because it proves that there is no such thing. There is only a cartoonist who is following the funny. ♦