Hello! This is Michelle Reid from Dodge City. I’m the librarian at Dodge City High School, and I serve on the Dodge City Public Library Board of Trustees. I’m here to talk about one of the spring Radio Readers Book Club choices, the book What’s So Funny? A Cartoonist’s Memoir, by David Sipress.
I read young adult fiction books almost exclusively, for my work and because I enjoy them. I rarely read nonfiction. I decided to read this particular book, which is both an adult book and nonfiction, in part to push myself to read outside my usual book diet. It was a short, quick read, peppered with cartoons we all recognize from the New Yorker.
Sipress’ book, although part of the Spring theme “Humor Me,” was not what I would consider a funny book. Keep in mind that my sense of humor is tuned to that of high school students, so other readers may find this book more amusing than I did. Despite that, I enjoyed this book. It offers a clear view into the life experiences that inspired a New Yorker cartoonist’s many funny, poignant, and touching cartoons.
In his memoir, David Sipress shares stories about his interactions with his family - his father, his mother, and his older sister - throughout his life. He reflects on how his cartoons are directly related to and influenced by these interactions with his family members, and the book includes the cartoons that were inspired by the interactions as he narrates them. Sipress is a prolific cartoonist; his collection includes over 700 cartoons published in the New Yorker some of which stem from his time spent as the New Yorker’s daily cartoonist. His cartoons have been published in many other publications, both print and online. Chances are you’ve seen his work many times and didn’t know it. I found that to be the case, as Sipress’ work is everywhere.
Sipress’s memoir illustrates that the best comedy comes from insights into human nature, and often the funniest people work from unfunny circumstances. While telling us about his family and their dynamics, he primarily focuses on his upbringing and his relationship with his father. He sprinkles the book with the “funny” stories of his youth, stories that his mother loved to tell about him, and as he relates these stories, you understand that because he knows the background of these family stories, he does not find them as amusing to hear over and over again as everyone else does. It’s a feeling that many of us can relate to. The stories about us that our families find the most amusing are often the same stories that embarrass us or cause us the most pain.
Sipress writes a great deal about his father and their relationship. His father was an immigrant whose Russian Jewish family left Russia when his father was about nine years old to escape the pogroms and persecution Jewish people faced there. At some point in his early adulthood, Sipress’ father became estranged from his family. However, Sipress never learned how that estrangement happened, as his father refused to discuss it. Although his father didn’t talk about his early life, to the point that Sipress never met any of his father’s family members, his father’s early experiences had a heavy influence on his son’s life, as revealed through his father’s expectations and fears. A thread throughout his book is the silence that surrounded difficult topics in his family, from his father’s past to his sister’s mental health, and how one deals with family silence and secrets as an adult. That’s a theme with which many readers can relate.
Sipress also writes about his sister and her relationship with each of the family members. His sister relied heavily on their father for his father’s entire life, a relationship that Sipress struggled to understand. She had a fraught and painful relationship with their mother. Sipress felt that she had nothing but disdain and dislike for him as they grew up together. He learns after his parents’ deaths that his sister has lived with mental illness her entire life; he had never known this, because like his father’s history, it was one of the family secrets.
Another familiar theme is the weight of family expectation versus our own happiness. Sipress’ family expected him to meet the goals they had for him; those goals meant becoming a professor of Russian history. Sipress attempted to meet those expectations but dropped out of Harvard just before his final semester of graduate school after finally realizing that he wasn’t living his own truth. He writes that the only time he could recall his father cursing at him was when he called to tell his parents that he had dropped out of graduate school to pursue cartooning. As his father did, Sipress becomes estranged from his parents and sister. While he pursued cartooning as a career, he lived away and apart from the father he feared he had disappointed beyond repair. Even when he reached his goal of publishing his first cartoon in the New Yorker, he felt his father took no pride in his accomplishment… which of course made its way into one of his cartoons.
Sipress’ book, although not one I consider funny, shows us the humanity behind his cartoons. He illustrates in both his book and his cartoons that we all share so many experiences as part of the human race. And isn’t that what art can do? Show us our shared humanity so we feel less alone? Sipress does this well in both his cartoons and his stories in his book What’s So Funny? A Cartoonist’s Memoir.
For High Plains Public Radio’s Radio Reader, this is Michelle Reid from Dodge City.
