David Sipress - Whats So Funny?: A Cartoonists Memoir

The sun rises on the Upper East Side and sets on the Upper West Side.

This cartoon was published in The New Yorker in 2001, making it one of the first I sold to the magazine after twenty-five years of submitting and being rejected. The idea came to me in the summer of 2000, when I was walking south on Fifth Avenue after an afternoon visit to the Met. Somewhere around Seventy-Second Street, the memory of another, long-ago walk on Fifth Avenue popped into my head and out popped the cartoon. It works that way sometimes the out-of-the-blue arrival of a fully formed idea.

The memory in question involved my parents, my older sister, and me. I was eight years old. The four of us had gone out to dinner one early summer evening at my parents favorite restaurant, Ginos, on Lexington Avenue, across the street from my fathers jewelry shop. There were always well-known people dining at Ginos. A few weeks before, we were there with a friend of my parents and he pointed out Charles Addams, sitting at the bar. I remember thinking that he looked just like one of his drawings (something people would say about me one day). That night we also saw the actor Montgomery Clift, who was a customer of my fathers, sitting at a small table with Arthur Miller, whose literary accomplishments paled, as far as I was concerned, beside the fact that he was married to Marilyn Monroe.

As we were on our way out of the restaurant, my father stepped back and reverently held the door for the arriving Bess Myerson famous television personality and the first Jewish Miss America. My familys relaxed, primarily secular Jewishness was a complicated and sometimes confusing affair. As a kid I understood that Jewish was just one thing we were more fundamental perhaps but not all that different from our being New Yorkers, or Democrats, or Brooklyn Dodgers fans. On the other hand, we were always quick to root for and celebrate members of our tribe who broke barriers and made it big athletes, scientists, writers, artists, actors, diplomats, and smart, talented beauty queens like Bess Myerson.

It wasnt dark yet when we walked out onto Lexington Avenue. There was a fancy black limousine parked in front of the restaurant. The uniformed chauffeur was leaning against the fender holding a leash at the end of which a little French poodle leapt back and forth, barking like a maniac at the door of Ginos.

Hes funny, I said to my mother. I wonder who he belongs to?

Whoever it is, they better own a pair of ear plugs, my father said.

The poodle came over to me, looked up, and barked at me like I was the problem.

Dont get too close, my mother warned. Its the little ones that really bite.

Lets go, my sister pleaded. She was always impatient, especially when the four of us were out together.

My mother suggested we take a walk on Fifth Avenue before getting a taxi back to our apartment on the Upper West Side.

All right, but I just hope we can find a cab, said my father, suddenly sounding grumpy for no apparent reason, as so often was the case. They arent so frequent on Fifth, he explained.

Fifth goes downtown, my sister chimed in. They wont want to take us.

All we can do is ask, said my mother.

Maybe we can ask Fifth to go uptown, I said. My mother laughed.

We walked in spite of my fathers misgivings, still hearing the poodle halfway to Park Avenue. When we turned on to Fifth, as taxi after vacant taxi sped by without my father lifting his hand to signal, I looked up and was startled by the sight of the dreamy, sparkling skyline of Central Park South and Midtown Manhattan, silhouetted against a dusky, pink sky, and I felt a powerful surge of desire: When I grew up, I told myself, I was going to escape the New York of my parents and find a way into the New York I saw glittering above the treetops of Central Park. It would be a New York full of cool, amazing, talented people like the actors and famous writers and artists I saw dining at Ginos people who didnt need to worry about every little thing. I would be an artist too, I decided. What kind of artist would I be? I knew that I loved to draw. I also knew that I was funny at least my mother thought so.

I did the calculation:

drawing + funny = cartoonist

When we returned to our apartment on West Seventy-Ninth Street, I went straight to my room, took out my crayons, and got to work. I had had an idea on the way home, and five minutes later, I turned it into my first actual cartoon: