Hello. I’m Bob Seay, author of the book Dad, and this is the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
Books, especially a book like What’s So Funny: A Cartoonist’s Memoir by David Sipress, are both windows and mirrors. On the window side, we get to look into the lives of others whose experiences and circumstances are totally different than our own. I can never know what it’s like to grow up, as David Sipress did, in a Jewish family on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the 1950s. Since this is a Kansas radio station, I should specify that this is Manhattan as in part of New York City and not Manhattan Kansas. When David Sipress was growing up in the 1950s and '60s, the Upper West Side was a mixture of middle-class families, starving artists, wealthy elites, and working-class New Yorkers. It was a cross-section of New York in a time and place I can never experience. That’s the magic of books.
We’re looking through a window at the psyche of a man who grew up in a very different world than that of most HPPR listeners, or at least this one. It’s an interesting perspective, helped out by the fact that David Sipress, whose cartoon panels – they’re always just a single panel – have been published in The New Yorker since 1998. His panels have also appeared in the Washington Post, Men’s Health, and about a dozen other magazines. As he mentions in the book, he received a lot of rejections before he finally got published. Sipress may be a genius—he attended an elementary school that was referred to at the time as The School for Little Geniuses. He later left a Harvard PhD program in Russian history to pursue cartooning. But he had to pay his dues to be accepted as a cartoonist.
This isn’t a typical biography that moves in a straight line through the life of the individual. There are some detours along the way. It is, as the name implies, a collection of memories and reflections on those experiences. We see David’s childhood, we see him as a young adult, his career, and finally how he deals with aging parents. It’s an interesting look at what, in some ways, is a very normal life.
That’s the window. As for the mirror, Sipress’ cartoon panels look like quick line sketches, just black ink on white paper. They look like something you or I might draw on the back of an envelope while we’re killing time. I didn’t say that just anyone could draw that way, just that it’s easy to think you might be able to. You have to be really good at something to make it look that easy. His captions are as minimalistic as his art, usually only a single line with casual language, often ironic, contrasting the dramatic with the mundane; the reasonable with the absurd. The artwork provides the setup, but the joke is in the caption. This concise style makes Sipress’ cartoons instantly and almost universally relatable, no matter where you might be from.
We like Sipress because when we look at his cartoons, we see ourselves looking back. It doesn’t matter if you’re from Manhattan, New York or Manhattan, Kansas. These are universal themes. All of us have experienced anxiety, self-doubt, or even, on a really bad day, existential dread. All of us have felt the disconnect between expectations and reality, between promises and what was actually delivered. All of us have families and all the complications families bring, whether you are a high-brow member of New York’s social elite or a farmer running a combine in a wheat field.
This is the mirror that makes us look at David Sipress. This book is about what in to making that mirror, the struggles, the rejections, the complicated family relationships, and all the stuff that makes a person become a person. In this memoir, Sipress makes us realize that while we may all come from different places, much of what we see, feel, and think is the same. This is the kind of book you keep on your nightstand. You read a chapter, maybe two. And then you go to sleep with a smile—because no matter where you're from, this book reminds you: you're not alone.
