June 26, 2018
Theatre District, NY

I once pitched a caption so bad that I made New Yorker history.

Not the good kind of history. There’s no plaque. But somewhere in the record of that week’s Talk of the Town, there’s a line about a table of cartoonists greeting a pitched gag with “groans”. I am, as far as I can tell, the only cartoonist ever immortalised in the magazine for bombing at lunch. It feels right, somehow. A man should be remembered for something.

Let me back up.

The reason there was a journalist at lunch in the first place was that we had a guest. Gus Van Sant. That Gus Van Sant, who directed Good Will Hunting, Milk, and Drugstore Cowboy, and who had a film out that week about the cartoonist John Callahan, called Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. So this was not a normal Tuesday.

The lunch itself, though, was the usual ritual. After the Tuesday pitch meeting at the New Yorker, a batch of us would shuffle up to Pergola des Artistes in the Theatre District and talk shop over duck salad and cheap red wine. Eight of us that day. The duck salad arrived piled on the plate like it had fallen out of a ziplock bag. It always did. That was part of the charm, or at least that’s what we told ourselves.

In attendance, in no particular order, were Sid Harris, Sofia Warren, Felipe “Fego” Galindo, Farley Katz, Sam Gross, Jason Adam Katzenstein and Cartoon Editor, Emma Allen.

Sam Gross held court. Sam usually did. He pulled out a stack of cartoons and told stories about Callahan and about every other cartoonist he’d known across half a century of this strange trade. Gossip, scandal, kvetching: the whole nine. The rest of us pecked away at our duck and listened like apprentices, which is exactly what we were.

At some point, Sam slid the cartoons across and invited captions. And I, God help me, pitched one…

Read more

“Youp.”

Where I’m from, that’s a diagnosis. My uncle Greg taught it to me as a child: “Mate, get a load of this bloke. He drinks his own fucken bath water.” (Australian for arrogant.) First cousin to tall poppy syndrome, that great national project of never letting anyone tout their own success.

I opened the book to that page first, and decided the next hour of my morning was spoken for. Which is roughly how the whole conversation went.

A book with no thread, which is the whole point…

The reason for the visit was Horseshoes and Tardigrades and Other Drawings, Rich’s new collection, put out by our mutual pal Marty over at The Weekly Humorist. A book of single-panel cartoons is one of the hardest things in the world to assemble, and I say that as someone who has tried. There’s no narrative. No theme. No throughline to hide behind. It’s just a brain, decanted onto a few hundred pages, arranged so a stranger will smile no matter where they crack it open.

I got my copy in the mail the other day. I had mail to sort- urgent, adult, responsible-immigrant mail. Instead of opening my Jury Duty letter, I sat down with the book instead and didn’t move for an hour and a half. Morris watched me from the floor with the quiet judgment of a dog who knows the difference between work and joy and resents being excluded from the second.

Rich works out of Chicago, has been at it for decades, and turns up pretty much anywhere a cartoon can legally be printed- the New Yorker, Air Mail, the lot. The story goes that he got his start redrawing a Ring bell for service sign on the scale in the produce department of a grocery store, then quietly updating it every week until customers started coming by to see what it said. That’s the whole career in miniature, really. Couldn’t not do it.

“Getting a dog right
doesn’t mean getting a dog funny.”

This is the line I came away with, and I suspect it’ll rattle round my skull for months. (it’s around the 40:47 mark).

We got talking about reference, because Rich draws his animals from photos. I thought he knew what a dog looked like. Then I spent months -months!— trying to work out the shape a dog makes when it leaps to catch a ball, only to discover that the real anatomy of a jumping dog is so deranged it looks like a printing error.

He personally lands, as you do, somewhere between the truth and the lie.

I quoted the late James Stevenson, the New Yorker cartoonist, who said that “Until you draw a picture of something, you are apt to be dead wrong about what it looks like.” And that’s the trade, isn’t it? You think you know your own father’s face until you try to put it on paper and realise you’ve been carrying around a rough sketch your whole life.

But here’s the bathos (because there’s always bathos). Even after all that fastidious study of the real, Rich’s actual insight is that accuracy isn’t the job. You can chase the truth of a thing for weeks and still have to abandon it at the last second for the funnier pose. There’s a reality inside the panel, and it is not this one.

I think about that with caricature. The likeness lives in the asymmetry- the bit of a face that’s slightly wrong is the bit that’s most them. Same with bodies. Rich said he sees the human form in three dimensions, rotating, and that when genuine symmetry turns up it’s so rare it’s almost shocking to look at. The rest of us are gloriously, correctly lopsided. The algorithm would like to convince you otherwise. The algorithm can drink its own bath water.

Here’s the bit where I rattle the tin.

These recaps take a while. The interview’s the fun part- the writing-up is me, alone, in the studio, doing the cartoonist’s equivalent of drawing the dog’s back leg forty times until it’s both true and funny. It’s a solitary job, as Rich said.

If you’ve read this far, you’re my kind of reader, and I’d love you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It’s a dollar a week. That’s less than a single bad coffee in this city, and considerably less than a good one.

It keeps the lights on, the cheap whiskey in the glass, and the bath water in the bath, where it belongs.

Subscribe now

The men in the cartoons are all his father.

This was the moment the whole hour tilted.

I’d been banging on about the glasses -Rich draws this specific flat-topped frame, the kind where you can’t see the eyes, and I’d built an entire theory about Scott McCloud, and how a reader projects themselves onto a face they can’t quite read.

Then he said the men in the drawings are his dad. Or versions of his dad. The glasses, the little moustache, the high-waisted trousers, the bit more hair than a man that age has any right to keep. He’s been drawing his father, over and over, for a career.

We didn’t dwell. Cartoonists never do. We pivoted immediately to the fact that he draws nearly everything with a Uniball Vision. Because the ink isn’t waterproof, I sometimes cheat a little wash out of it with a water brush- making it look like I hauled a full watercolour kit to the desk when really I just smudged a pen.

The deep cuts, the dick jokes, and Vlad the Employer

The book is stuffed with what I can only call cartooning deep cuts. There’s a Leonardo da Muncie, a Charlie Brown gag built on the first Peanuts strip ever published. There’s a podcast hosted by a dog that I would, hand on heart, subscribe to over most of the human-hosted ones currently clogging the feed.

And then there’s Vlad.

Rich has a Vlad the Impaler in the book, and seeing it sent me straight back to my own- a Vlad the Employer I drew years ago, the warlord interviewing a candidate, captioned “You start Monday!” I went to enormous, faintly insane lengths to get the costuming, jewellery and spear historically correct, because the New Yorker employs fact-checkers and I wasn’t about to be caught out on the haberdashery of a fifteenth-century warlord.

The joke is stupid. I knew it was stupid. I drew it purely to please myself and threw it into the batch as filler, fully expecting it to make the good ones look better by comparison. It’s the one Bob Mankoff took one look at and said O.K. -which, as anyone who’s submitted a batch knows, is never the one you bet on. You send your bangers and your sacrificial throwaway, and the machine reaches past all of it for the daft one you never meant anyone to see.

We also fielded a chat question from about how on earth Facebook hasn’t banned him, given the, ah, anatomical confidence of certain drawings. Rich’s answer was a masterclass in living with the unknowable: he genuinely doesn’t know whether it’s a buggy AI, a phantom moderation team, or simple cosmic luck, and he’s decided that thinking about it is the surest way to summon it. “I feel like I’m always on the verge of getting in trouble,” he said. I told him that’s a wonderful place to live. I should know. I’m subletting there too.

Chickening out at Disneyland

The detail I can’t shake: Rich has been to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library at Ohio State (the site of this year’s Reuben awards). It’s the largest cartoon collection on Earth, the actual Disneyland for people like us, originals sitting in flat files like it’s nothing. And while he was there, he spotted the curator Caitlin McGurk behind a door. A social media friend. Someone who’d have been thrilled to meet him. And he got starstruck and couldn’t bring himself to say hello.

Read more

I am, by my own admission, a fanboy.

The quiet kind, who reads someone’s work for years and builds a whole imaginary friendship in his head, full of inside jokes the other person has never heard. Today that friendship gets a terrifying upgrade to a real one…

Rich Sparks is my guest on Draw Me Anything today, Wednesday, 12:30pm EDT. Set an alarm. Wedge it into your calendar between lunch and your nap.

TUNE IN FREE AT 12:30PM!

His cartoons turn up in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Air Mail, Barron’s, Weekly Humorist, The American Bystander, Narrative, and roughly everywhere else with the sense to print funny drawings. But he got there by a gloriously crooked road. Back in 1982, working the produce department of a grocery store in Lincoln Park, he was handed a “Ring Bell for Service” sign to keep updated, and quietly turned it into a weekly single-panel cartoon that built a following among the customers. He’s since said it was his own little comic panel, and not unlike what he’s doing now, which is either a lovely full circle or proof that none of us ever really change.

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

Then he gave up drawing altogether for years to play in bands. He picked the pen back up around 2015 and took aim at the New Yorker, which for cartoonists is roughly, oh, the Olympics?

He’s still a founding member of the indie band The Last Afternoons, because being brilliant at one thing was apparently insufficiently humbling for the rest of us.

Here’s what I love about Rich. With most cartoonists, you can see the shape of the joke before you arrive. With Rich, you never know what the fuck you’re going to get. His work’s been called whimsical, oddball, raunchy, and dark, and you will laugh, and you might cringe, sometimes in the same panel.

Barry Blitt, New Yorker cover artist: “Rich Sparks’ stuff is much funnier than anything by Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates. And you can tell them I said so. Wait, don’t. Please don’t say anything.”

We’ll be talking about his new book, Horseshoes and Tardigrades, out from The Weekly Humorist. The blurbs alone are worth the price of admission.

David Yow, frontman of the Jesus Lizard, marshalled the full weight of his critical faculties: “Rich Sparks’s books are better than other books.” You cannot argue with it. I’ve tried.

And Gary Taxali, who got closest to the truth, said the best art makes you want to reach in and touch it. He added that Rich didn’t pay him to say this, though he’s fairly sure he can get a beer out of him. A man should always have a clear deliverable.

I read his other book, Love & Other Weird Things, several years ago and was doubled-over laughing on nearly every page. It was ugly stuff, looking at me guffawing and chortling like a lunatic. My dog left the room and never looked at me the same way again.

So: Wednesday, 12:30pm EDT. Rich is in Chicago, I’m in Hell’s Kitchen, and a man who started out drawing on a produce sign is about to meet a man who, frankly, peaked at greasing pizza pans in high school. Bring your questions. Bring your tardigrades. Just turn up.

Add it to your calendar now!

‘til then!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

Share

When I first moved to New York 12 years ago, I did what every terrified transplant does: I asked other comedians for advice…

This was a mistake, because comedians are a bag of cats and no two of them agree on anything. One told me to do every open mic in the city. One told me to do none of them. One told me, with great seriousness, to “find my inner hobgoblin,” which is the kind of thing people say when they have no actual information to give you and would like you to leave them alone please.

But there was one piece of advice that came back every single time, from every single person, like a liturgical response…

“Go get yourself a Mindy.”

Stop using Facebook photos for your headshot, you absolute disgrace, and go get a real one done by Mindy Tucker.

So I did. That’s how we met. I schlepped to her studio in Brooklyn, helped her haul lighting gear around Williamsburg in search of a wall that wasn’t a condo yet, sweated through a shirt, and carried the gear back up the stairs again. We did things this way because we couldn’t afford a studio, and back then you could still shoot outside before the entire borough turned into guarded glass.

That was twelve years ago. This week, Mindy came on Draw Me Anything, and I finally got to tell a few thousand people what the New York comedy scene has known for two decades: she’s the best there is.

Draw Me Anything is a livestream & podcast about artists, comedians, writers, and the people who make things.

This newsletter costs less than an IPA in this neighbourhood, which, in my experience, is money well spent either way. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to keep it going…

Here’s the thing about Mindy that took me years to understand. She doesn’t just take a good photo. She gets something out of you that nobody else can.

Comedians are a nightmare to photograph. We’re always on. We’re cracking wise, busting balls, performing, running a bit, because the bit is a shield and the camera is a threat. Point a lens at a comic and watch them deploy their entire personality as a defence mechanism.

Mindy disarms all of it. Her trick, which is not really a trick, is time. She found that comedians needed more time, and that if you gave people time they seemed to calm down and stop being nervous. She gives you a job. She has you help her move a light. And somewhere in the puttering and the “oh wait, stay right there,” the armour comes off, and she catches the actual person underneath.

When I told her this, she explained where it comes from, and it’s the best origin story: Her dad was a chaplain. Not a desk chaplain, a sports chaplain. He’d pray with the team before the game, sit through the game, and if a player got hurt, he’d be the one riding in the ambulance, relaying what was happening back to the church. And Mindy looked at me and said, with total clarity:

“Basically what I’ve done is I’ve taken what my dad has always done, and I’ve added photos.”

It was recently Jim Gaffigan, of all people, who first pointed this out to her. Four years into shooting comedy, he told her: “Your dad’s a preacher*, that’s why you get along with performers, you lived with a performer.” He just read her whole life back to her like a palm. She didn’t fully clock it herself until later. The wax-on-wax-on moment; this realisation that she’d been training for the thing her whole life without knowing it.
(*Other famous preachers-turned-comedians include the incredible Sam Kinnison and one-time NYC Regular Justin Smith)

A million of us. In a box.

Now to the actual reason she came on… Mindy’s launched something called Mindy’s Comedy Archives, and you need to understand the scale of it before you understand why it matters:

She has, at last count, over one million photographs. A million. And that number was current as of the day she taped her second and third episodes, so it’s already wrong, and wrong in the upward direction, because she keeps adding to it…

I went on a bit of a tear about this on the show, so forgive me, but: there is no real history of New York comedy. There are scattered special reviews, the odd opinion piece in the Times, a Chortle write-up here and there. But there is no cohesive, visual, living document of this absurdly specific art form in this absurdly specific city.

Except there is. It’s in Mindy’s hard drives.

Last week I had Myq Kaplan on, and we talked about the brutal churn of a comedy career: the bright-eyed arrival, the agent, the manager, the late-night spot, the sitcom, the rollercoaster with no terminus. Myq’s point was that once you realise that’s the career, the constant insane flux, that’s the whole thing.

What Mindy has is that flux, frozen, frame by frame. One comedian over an entire career, from their very first nervous headshot all the way through shows and festivals and late-night spots, and you watch them change. Their posture, their costume, their face. They age. They evolve. Nobody else has documented this the way Mindy has. She did it by accident, one shoot at a time, for twenty years.

The format
is beautifully simple.

A comic comes in and gets handed a box of photos. It starts with the very first photo Mindy ever took of them, and they go in chronological order, telling her as much or as little as they want about what was going on in their career and in the New York comedy scene at the time.

The first episode, out this week, is with Rosebud Baker, and Mindy calls it the blueprint. Rosebud starts in a 2014 group photo, a gaggle of comedians, and by the end they’ve done a Netflix special cover and land on her book cover.

“That’s why we live here.”

The first episode didn’t go perfectly. The blog post wasn’t up on time. The workflow wasn’t sorted. And Mindy’s attitude toward all of it was the thing I keep turning over. She told Rosebud, essentially: it’s not perfect, can you help me get started?

Read more

Saturday, 9th May, 2026
West Village, New York

If you want to know how my Saturday started, I can summarise it in a single, deeply aggravating sentence…

I arrived at FedEx at 9:30AM to pick up our event signage, only to find the doors locked, the lights off, and not a single soul inside. There is a very particular type of panic that sets in when you are scheduled to host a live event in Manhattan in less than an hour, and your entire visual display is trapped behind corporate glass. After a frantic scramble and some aggressive tapping on my phone, I managed to pay a bike messenger to go back at 10am and race the signage down the West Side Highway. It arrived with mere minutes to spare. Because the show, as they say, must go on.

Scott and I spent the day posted up at the front of Framebridge in the West Village, armed with a stack of our new books, You’re Not a Real Dog Owner Until..., and a mountain of Blackwing pencils. We weren’t just there to hawk books, though. We were there raising money for Rain or Shine Rescue, an incredible organisation that helps foster dogs and find them forever homes.

Our job for the day? Signing the books and sketching people’s dogs directly onto the title pages, live and on the spot, using the lock-screens and camera rolls of the people standing in front of us.

Despite the morning logistical nightmare, it was pretty fantastic. We had a non-stop line the entire day. People brought their own rescue pups to the table, neighbourhood regulars stopped by, and we spent hours doing our absolute favourite thing in the world: drawing dogs and talking to the people who are also obsessed with them.

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

When you spend an entire day drawing New Yorkers’ dogs from their owners’ phones, you start to notice a few undeniable truths:

• The 8,000 Photo Disclaimer: No dog owner will ever just show you one photo of their dog. They will scroll through an album of 8,000 nearly identical photos, furiously apologising because “he’s usually way cuter than this, wait, let me find the one of him in the little sweater from last Tuesday...”

  

• The Convergence Theory is Real: It is a cliché, but it is true: New Yorkers eventually morph into their dogs. I drew a Wirehaired Pointing Griffon for a guy in a tweed blazer, and I swear to God they both looked like they taught philosophy at NYU.

• The Neurotic Stare: Every single rescue dog in Manhattan has a very unique look in its eyes. It’s a mix of deep, soulful gratitude and the vibrating, existential anxiety of a creature that has to trot past a screeching garbage truck every morning to pee. They are the perfect muses.

Of course, because it’s New York in the spring, the sky eventually decided to open up. We got rained out, frantically grabbed our easels and books, and shuffled the entire operation inside the Framebridge store. Twenty minutes later, the sun came back out, and we dragged the whole circus right back onto the sidewalk.

It was chaotic, it was exhausting, and it was the most fun we’ve had in months. We are absolutely going to do it again soon.

But here is the best part: if you couldn’t make it to the West Village to stand in line while it rained, you don’t have to miss out. We are still doing custom dog sketches directly into the pages of the book. You can order one right now, and we will draw your weird, beautiful, neurotic dog and ship it straight to your door.

WANT TO GET YOUR DOG DRAWN IN THE BOOK?

ORDER YOURS HERE

A huge thank you to everyone who came out to Bank Street, braved the weather, and helped us raise money for Rain or Shine Rescue. If you’d like to donate to them, you can do so here.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

Share

I have a face like a sat-on hat, and Mindy Tucker is the only person who’s ever made it look intentional.

Back when I first crawled into the New York comedy scene- jet-lagged, broke, convinced everyone could tell I’d been doing shitty bar gigs in Melbourne three weeks earlier- the first piece of good advice I got from other comics was:

“Get a Mindy.”

Not a comedy headshot. A Mindy. She is THE comedy photographer in this town. If you’ve stood on a New York stage and held a microphone in the last twenty years, there is roughly a 90% chance she’s the reason your face looks employable on a club poster… which is why I’m so happy she’s showing her very employable face on my show this week! (Monday 1pm)

ADD IT TO YOUR CALENDAR NOW!

After a decade of living here, we properly bonded at Nell’s Fest in October 2023- a comedy festival in the middle of Pennsylvania, which sounds like the opening of a film where nobody makes it home. She is, and I say this with the full authority of a man who has watched a lot of people fail to be good company in a small town in the middle of nowhere, the best. Sharp, kind, funny, and frankly wasted on the rest of us.

Now she’s launched Mindy’s Comedy Archives, a visual podcast where comedians flip through a chronological stack of their old photos -starting with their very first Mindy- and use each one to unlock the memories: the day jobs, the bombs, the breakthroughs, the friendships. An overhead camera builds a live collage while they talk. Each episode ends with “Do you remember your first joke?” and a fresh portrait for the archive.

It is, in other words, the single most Mindy idea imaginable: she has been quietly building a museum of all of us this entire time, and we only just noticed. She needs funding to keep it going. This is the part where I tell you to throw money at it.

Here’s why you should:

The New York comedy scene eats its own history. People burn out, move to LA, get a podcast about cryptocurrency, vanish. Mindy is the one person who kept the receipts: Twenty years of faces, most of them terrified, all of them young. She isn’t just photographing comedians. She’s the reason any of us will be able to prove we were here.

So go support Mindy’s Comedy Archives. Throw in a few bucks. Tell her Jason sent you, and that I still owe her for making me look like I had a plan.

I didn’t. I still don’t.

But the photos are amazing.

I can’t wait for you to meet her!

Add it to your calendar now!

‘Til then!

Your pal,

PS. If reading this helped you delay opening a message from your mother detailing a distant relative’s gout flare-up, please restack and share it. Word of mouth is the only marketing strategy I can afford.

Share

Let me tell you who is, because if you’re not already a fan, that changes today.

He’s been doing comedy for going on twenty-five years. He has a Comedy Central special. He was a finalist on Last Comic Standing. He’s been on Comedy Bang Bang and Keith and the Girl more times than I can count. He has two specials on YouTube - AKA and Rini - and a new one he’s just recorded. He runs a Substack called , which you should subscribe to immediately after this. He is one of the most densely packed laughs-per-minute comedians working anywhere in this city, and I say that as someone who has been watching this scene very closely for fifteen years.

He is also the reason I once shot IPA out of my nose at a comedy show on Second Avenue. But we’ll get to that.

The first thing you need to know about Myq Kaplan is that his name is, by design, a barrier to entry. It’s pronounced “Mike”, not “Meek”.

“I brought it upon myself, obviously, the spelling of my name,” he told me, almost immediately after we started recording. “There’s a little bit of a barrier to entry. But once you get past, then I feel like there’s a lot of reward.”

He then, in the same breath, held up a microphone. “This is a Meek.”

I say “by design” because everything about Myq’s comedy is by design -the spelling of his name, the precision of his phrasing, the way a simple prop becomes the punchline to a joke that is also, if you look at it properly, a philosophical position about the rewards of paying attention. Nothing is accidental. The commitment to craft runs so deep that it’s become invisible, which is when craft becomes art.

The name story is one I’ve been dining out on since 2014. I was a young, fledgling comedian appearing on a certain popular podcast, and I was doing my plugs at the end of the show. Bob Kelly was hosting. I was reading names off the lineup for an upcoming show - I think it was the Producers Club - and I arrived at Myq’s name, and I said: “and Meek Kaplan.”

The room turned on me. Louis J. Gomez. Dan Soder. Joe List. All of them glaring at me with the familiar expression that New York comics reserve for someone who’s just revealed a catastrophic gap in their knowledge.

“You fucking Australians,” somebody said. “How have you never heard of Myq Kaplan?” They laid into me for twenty minutes. About my accent. About my ignorance. About the basic expectation that someone doing comedy in New York should know who Myq Kaplan is, which is, I’ll grant them, a fair point.

And then, having absorbed all of this - having been fully educated and corrected and aware - I subsequently introduced Myq on stage that night as “Meek Kaplan.” Again.

Myq received this with extraordinary grace. “Your trauma is my treasure,” he said.

But the real first time I encountered Myq Kaplan was not that night. It was earlier - 2011, or thereabouts. I was still coming to New York as a tourist then, once a year, for a month at a time, in the way that people who are going to end up living somewhere do before they commit to actually living there. I was going to as many comedy shows as I could, trying to understand the scene, sheepishly introducing myself to people and then overthinking every conversation afterwards on the subway home.

The show was called Kabin. It was on Second Avenue, the back room of a bar. Rebecca Trent booked it. It was, by the general consensus of everyone who was there at the time, the best comic hang in the city. Their fifth anniversary show, I think it was, went from six in the afternoon until five in the morning. 11 hours. I was in that room for most of it.

I had a beer in my hand. Sean Donnelly was hosting, or someone like Sean Donnelly. Whoever it was said, with the full weight of insider authority: you are going to love this next guy.

I took a sip.

Myq Kaplan walked on stage and said something. I genuinely do not know what it was. I have never known. What I know is that the beer - an IPA, specifically, which made the whole thing considerably worse - travelled at velocity through my nasal cavity and exited my face in a direction that beer is not supposed to exit. My eyes were streaming from the carbonation. I was making sounds that grown adults should not make in public. Eight minutes later, Myq left the stage, and I was a different person.

It is a trauma-memory. The kind that’s vivid, not because it was bad, but because it was so involuntary. The laugh didn’t ask my permission.

“That’s very, very kind, very thoughtful for you to share,” Myq said when I told him this story on the podcast. “Better than a spit take. Your trauma is my treasure.”

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

Read more

I gave Morris an extra treat this morning. Then another one. Then a third, because it’s his birthday and I have no self-control around him, and frankly, neither should you.

He turned seven today. In dog years, that makes him somewhere around 49, which means he’s older than me and handling his forties with considerably more grace. He gets up every morning with an alacrity I find personally offensive. He has never once complained about his knees.

I got him in 2019 - before the pandemic, before all of it. He has been present for the full unravelling and the slow, uncertain re-ravelling of my life in this city. I’ve done a book with him in it. He has met every single development with the same expression: ears up, tail going, ready for whatever comes next. He also sits and sceptically watches me work, keeping me honest…

A friend told me recently that once you know what it’s like to have a dog in the house, you can never go back. A house without one becomes a mausoleum, he said. He’s right. I’ve been in those houses. You can feel the absence of something warm and indiscriminate in them - something that tracks mud across the kitchen floor and sighs dramatically when dinner is thirty seconds late.

I won’t pretend I always deserved him. There were days during the worst of the pandemic when he was the only reason I left the apartment -and therefore the only reason I maintained any meaningful contact with the outside world and its complicated, often bewildering inhabitants. He made me walk. He made me stop. He reminded me, without ever saying a word (which dogs are extraordinarily good at), that the point of the day is mostly just to be in it.

Seven years of that. He’s got a few grey hairs on his chin now. I’ve got a few more on my temples.

To those of you who subscribe partly because of this dog: I see you. I know. And on his behalf, thank you. He is, in every meaningful sense, the better content creator in this operation. I just hold the pen.

Happy birthday, Morris. You absolute menace.
The Goodest of Boys.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

Tuesday, 21st April 2026
Greenwich Village, NY

There’s a very particular kind of electricity that hums in the green room of a live show at the Comedy Cellar.

It’s a kind of ‘casual nervous’ energy. Comedians pacing, staring blankly into the notes app on their phones, producers nervously checking their watches. But last night was different. Last night, I was backstage to introduce my friend, the brilliant Nayeema Raza, for a live recording of her podcast, “Smart Girl, Dumb Questions.” Her guest was Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Neil is currently launching his new book, a scientifically infused etiquette guide and user’s manual for what to do when we finally make contact with extraterrestrial life. So, naturally, the backstage conversation bypassed the usual polite New York small talk and immediately accelerated into the stratosphere.

The following is a full 8-part accounting of what results when you cram a top-tier podcaster, a New Yorker cartoonist, and a world-famous astrophysicist into a small room together before a show…

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

Part I:
The Gravitational Pull of a Star

If you’ve ever wondered what Neil deGrasse Tyson is like in person, I can confirm that the man does not merely enter a room; he establishes a gravitational orbit.

He is exactly as you see him on television: booming, impossibly enthusiastic, relentlessly curious, and utterly immune to mundane small talk. While most people backstage are complaining about the MTA or the weather, Neil is dissecting the air pressure of vintage subwoofers.

Before we even sat down, we were talking about the old-school speakers bolted to the corner wall. Neil climbed on the stool to take a closer look at the rear of the Bose speakers and was explaining the sheer, concussive force of low-frequency audio. “It could blow out a match,” he told me, describing the air pressure coming out of the cones.

That is the baseline frequency of hanging out with Neil. Everything is a lesson in physics, delivered with the cadence of a guy telling a great story at a bar.

But the real magic started when Nayeema handed him a copy of his new book…

Part II:
The Texture of the Galle[x]y

In the publishing world, the moment an author holds the physical copy of their book for the first time is practically a sacred ritual. Neil’s book had just come off the presses on Friday, and this was his first time seeing the Advance Review Copy. He’d only ever seen a rough galley to read the audiobook from.

He ran his hands over the cover. “The texture’s great,” he said, entirely ignoring the text. “It’s a match for me.”

Nayeema immediately started grilling him on the premise. The book is essentially an etiquette guide for close encounters; a manual from an astrophysicist who wants to meet the aliens as badly as we do.

“Do you really want to meet them as badly as you say you do?” Nayeema asked, pointing out that government accounts always seemed to be denying their existence. (Editors note: This was written before this happened.)

Neil, waving off the conspiracy theories, explained his stance with the kind of bulletproof logic that only a scientist can casually drop in a green room. He doesn’t need blurry photos or secret files. He just needs biological evidence. “If anyone has ever in the history of alien sightings brought forth an alien, no one would ever have to ask, ‘Do you believe in aliens?’” he said.

I agreed. He turned to me and asked, “Do you believe in elephants?”

“Oh, I’ve seen elephants in person,” I replied.

“Then we don’t have to ask, ‘Do you believe in elephants?’” Neil concluded. He noted that he is perfectly happy to accept the internet’s favourite theory that all the aliens are stockpiled or hidden by the government. “I’m just waiting for them to bring one out. That’s all.”

Part III:
Ta[l]king Up Space

If an alien does land, the immediate question is: to whom do you take them? Nayeema joked about taking the alien to a celebrity, but Neil pointed out that if you’re the first human an alien meets, you’re officially on the hook to establish a baseline of universal intelligence…

You can’t just speak English loudly and slowly. They’re not French. You have to speak “Space.”

And how do you speak Space? You use the periodic table. Apparently.

“They will have the same periodic table as we do,” Neil explained. “Because these are the same elements across the universe. And if they have any understanding of them, it’ll be organised in the way we have organised it. That’s the only sensible way we can do that.”

Even if the aliens call the elements by different names, the underlying sorting code is universal. “It’s how many protons do you have?” Neil said. The universe has an ordering: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen.

If you want to talk to an alien, you don’t say, ‘Repeat after me…’ “You’re going to say, ‘Show me something that you might care about in the universe that is universal,’” Neil said.

And the ultimate universal language? Mathematics.

“If you are of this universe, you will be fluent in math,” Neil declared. “Because math is the language of the universe.”

Nayeema, realising the gravity of this, confessed that she might be utterly useless to an alien because she isn’t great at math. Neil, without skipping a beat, laughed. “Well, no, then you’re not as useful for the alien.”

Part IV:
The Vocabulary Constabulary

At this point, Nayeema asked Neil to sign her copy of the book. It was dog-eared, highlighted, and absolutely littered with handwritten notes.

As a chronic reader who always holds a pencil while I skim, I looked at her heavily annotated book and offered a compliment. “A good book should have marginalia,” I said.

The room stopped. Neil locked onto me like a heat-seeking missile.

“Marginalia?” Neil repeated, his voice rising in incredulity. “Why did… that word? What kind of—what’d you get on your... Is it Australian? Marginalia?”

I tried to defend myself. “Yeah, I’m going to be useless talking to the aliens, saying shit like that.”

But Neil wasn’t letting it go. “Tell me the last time you heard that word used... In the wild,” he challenged.

Maybe unless they’re “Sesquipedaliens?” I offered…

I had to admit defeat. Outside of a literature seminar or a pretentious attempt to sound smart, nobody uses the word “marginalia” in casual conversation.

“Only a pretentious nerd trying to sneak it into a sentence says marginalia,” Neil insisted triumphantly. I nodded. “Uh, yeah. That’s 100% me, dude.”

Nayeema, loving the fact that I was getting roasted by an astrophysicist, said, “Oh, yeah. He loves using big words.” I said, “I’m someone who uses a big word when a diminutive one will suffice.1” I smirked, thinking I was terribly clever.

Neil laughed, admitting that while he reads the word, he rarely speaks it. “I didn’t know how to pronounce it,” he confessed. It sounds like a paleontological term. “Yeah, there was a platypus in it,” he joked.

Which, of course, led to a complete dismantling of my home country…

“It’s a joke we all played on the world,” I said about the platypus. “It doesn’t really exist. We made those up to fuck with everyone.”

He argued that the platypus is just the leftover evolutionary meatloaf of animals. I agreed entirely. “All the fauna are in Australia. It’s whatever was left in God’s animal parts bucket.”

We commiserated over the fact that both America and Australia started as colonies for the British, but America somehow managed to scrub the stain from their history with much better PR.

Part V:
The Declaration of Inde(pen)Dence

So. As Nayeema again asked Neil to sign her heavily annotated (sorry, marginalia-filled) book, he pulled out a pen. Not just a standard Bic. He pulled out a masterpiece. I said, “Is that the Montblanc Meisterstück?”

Neil immediately clocked it. “Oh, so you’re a stylophile, too?” he said. I rolled my eyes “Stylophile? What kind of pretentious douchebag uses that word?”

He chuckled. I then admitted that, yes, as a certified sesquipedalian stylophile and cartoonist, I often even write with a bronze-nibbed dip pen and ink. However, the Meisterstück is the Rolls-Royce of fountain pens. (See here for Wes Anderson explaining it the way only Wes Anderson can.)

This simple admission triggered one of the most brilliant, fascinating historical hypotheses I have ever heard… followed immediately by its spectacular collapse.

Neil asked me if I knew the Gettysburg Address. As an immigrant who had to pass the U.S. citizenship test, I arguably know it better than most Americans. He said, “Run a few lines for me.” So I started reciting it: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that—” “Okay, that’s enough.” Neil stopped me.

He told me to look at the phrasing of the speech:

“There are six, seven, eight-word phrases,” he explained. “That is as much ink as fits in a single dip of a pen.”

It was a staggering thought. Neil’s hypothesis was that Abraham Lincoln composed the speech rhythmically, dipping his pen, writing a phrase, pondering, and dipping it again. “Your listening ability matches the number of words a single dip of a pen will put on a page,” Neil said. “So that the rhythm of that speech is exactly the pen rhythm and a listening rhythm as well.”

It made perfect sense. It was a pentameter driven by the physical limitations of nineteenth-century ink. I asked him if it was true.

“Well.” He cleared his throat. “It’s a good hypothesis,” Neil hedged.

He then told the story of how he tested it.

During the Obama administration, Neil visited the White House and found himself in the famous Lincoln Bedroom, which holds the original copy of the Gettysburg Address. He walked up to the document, ready to confirm his brilliant theory about the ink dips and prove how clever he was to ‘Barry,’ who was standing beside him.

He looked closely at the paper, squinting incredulously.

“…Well, shit,” he spat.

“What is it?” Obama asked.

He put his face in his hands.

“It’s written in f*#ing pencil.”

I burst out laughing. “Your whole hypothesis... right into the toilet. In front of the President of the United States.”

Part VII:
Hands Across America(ns)

Neil stopped mid-sentence about something entirely unrelated (I think we were still arguing about the platypus) and grabbed my hand. Not in a warm, collegial “lovely to meet you” kind of way. In the way a surgeon grabs a scalpel. Purposeful. Clinical. Faintly alarming. It started, as most things do with Neil, with an observation that nobody else would have thought to make.

Melissa, one of Nayeema’s producers for the event, mentioned offhandedly that her hands were always cold. A normal person would have said, “Tell me about it!” and moved on with their life. Neil deGrasse Tyson stopped the entire room.

“Okay. So, just a quick lesson in thermodynamics...”

Nobody had asked for a quick lesson in thermodynamics. Nobody asked for a quick lesson in anything. We were about to walk out on stage. But you don’t say no to Neil when he’s got that look on his face.

“Two hands,” he announced, “cannot feel the same temperature to each other.”

He had us shake hands. Her, cold-handed. Me, apparently running warmer than a radiator in January. The result, Neil informed us, was that her hand felt warm to me and my hand felt warm to her -simultaneously, from the same handshake, the same moment in time, two completely different thermal realities.

Then he turned on Love Story.

You know the scene -she takes him to meet his wealthy family for the first time, they get out of the car, they touch hands, and she says, “Your hands are cold.” And he says, “So are yours.”

Neil’s verdict: “Can. Not. Happen.”

Physically impossible. According to the laws of thermodynamics, if both hands were the same temperature, neither person would feel anything at all - no warmth, no cold, just mutual thermal indifference. The most famous romantic moment in 1970s cinema is, in the eyes of physics, complete fiction.

“So are yours.” Ruined. Forever.

He wasn’t done. We needed a control. A third person, Nayeema, was recruited. Her hands fell somewhere between Melissa’s arctic fingers and my apparently ursine body heat. Neil walked us through the logic with the equanimity of a man who has explained the cosmos to millions and found a Comedy Cellar green room no less worthy a classroom.

I realised later, exactly the kind of moment that explains why Neil deGrasse Tyson is what he is. He cannot let an ordinary observation pass. A producer mentions cold hands, and within sixty seconds, you have a demonstration, a movie citation, and a controlled experiment with three test subjects. All before the show has even started. All delivered with the insouciance of someone pointing out the weather.

I run hot, it turns out. In the most literal, measurable, thermodynamic sense of the phrase. Neil confirmed it. In front of witnesses. I am choosing to take this as a compliment.

Part VIII:
The Greatest Show (Off) Earth

Moments later, a producer popped her head in the door and gave us the signal: It was time to head to the stage.

I walked out to the mic to introduce Nayeema, fully energised by the bizarre, high-speed intellectual ping-pong match that had just taken place in the green room. And when Neil walked out onto the stage, the crowd erupted.

What struck me most about the live show was that Neil didn’t change his persona one iota when the microphones turned on. There is no “stage version” of Neil deGrasse Tyson. The man who sat in front of the live audience, blowing their minds about the cosmos and extraterrestrial contact, was the exact same man who had just spent twenty minutes ruthlessly mocking my pretentious vocabulary and lamenting Abraham Lincoln’s stationery choices.

Related Reading:

Nayeema handled the interview masterfully. Interviewing Neil is like trying to put a saddle on a hurricane- you have to let him spin, let him explore the tangents, and then gently guide him back to the thesis. She navigated his cosmic enthusiasm perfectly, keeping the crowd entirely in the palm of her hand. (Watch the full show below)

It was a phenomenal night. A reminder that curiosity, humour, and a little bit of being a pretentious dickhead (as long as I’m willing to be called out on it) are the best ways to navigate the universe.

And if the aliens do finally show up, I know exactly what I’m going to do. I’m handing them a pencil and taking them straight to Neil.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

Share

Here’s something I’ve come to believe after 20+ years of cartooning and 19 years of stand-up: There are people telling funny jokes and funny people telling jokes. Myq is the latter.

The funniest people are not spontaneous. They are precise. The laugh isn’t an accident- it’s the product of someone who has thought obsessively about language, timing, and the exact weight of a single word. Funny people are born, comedians are made.

Which brings me to my guest this Wednesday on Draw Me Anything…

ADD IT TO YOUR CALENDAR NOW!

His name is spelt

It is pronounced, “Mike.” He is, as far as I can tell, the only stand-up comedian in America with a Master’s degree in linguistics, which, once you know it, makes everything about him make complete sense. The rapid-fire wordplay. The jokes that feel like they’re running three arguments simultaneously. The Substack, , where he writes long, fastidious essays dissecting why a single joke works- going deep into philosophy, spirituality, and language theory just to explain a punchline.

Myq Kaplan's Arty Har-Hars

I write about jokes that I love and why I love them and also I share my own jokes for you to love.

He has been doing stand-up for over twenty years. He placed fifth on Last Comic Standing. He appeared on Letterman, Conan (five times), Leno, Seth Meyers, James Corden, and Louie. He once played Mitch Hedberg in a TV show, which is either the greatest casting decision in comedy history or a genuinely unsettling thought experiment. His album A.K.A. debuted at number one, and the New York Times called it “invigoratingly funny.” He also contributed a track called “How Hitler Saved Christmas” to a Comedy Death-Ray Christmas album.

His newest one-hour special, Rini, dropped for free on YouTube last November. We are absolutely going to talk about why…

Keeping this digital enterprise afloat requires a terrifying amount of unblinking screen time. If you’d like to join the live stream and help fund the three venti Americanos I have to purchase just to trick my nervous system into feeling alive, consider a paid subscription. It’s $1 a week, which is roughly the sales tax on a single bagel in Manhattan.

But here’s the thing that really drew me to this conversation. Myq once went on a podcast specifically to discuss a joke that bombed for the New York Times. Not to explain it away. Not to salvage his dignity. To examine it. That is the act of someone who treats comedy the way a surgeon treats anatomy- with genuine curiosity about what’s inside, even when it’s messy. (And yes, the frog might die in the process, but we just don’t tell the next frog.)

I know do the same thing with cartoons at 2am. I suspect a few of you do it with your own work, whatever that work is…

Anyway, we’ll be talking about…

• The linguistics of a joke: What a Master’s in linguistics actually tells you about why certain words land and others don’t, and why most comedians will never be able to articulate what they already know instinctively.

• Twenty years of precision: How you build a career on wordplay and philosophy in a culture that increasingly rewards the fast and the loud.

• The bombing post-mortem: Myq once dissected a joke that failed in front of the New York Times. We’re going to talk about what you actually learn from a proper disaster.

• Spirituality, psychedelics, and the examined life: How a self-described atheist ended up somewhere considerably more interesting, and what that journey has done to the comedy.

• ADD IT TO YOUR CALENDAR NOW!

  I can’t wait for you to meet him.

‘Til then!

Your pal,

PS. If reading this helped you delay opening a message from your mother detailing a distant relative’s gout flare-up, please restack and share it. Word of mouth is the only marketing strategy I can afford.

Share

My drawing board is currently covered in a mix of art supplies and aggressively pungent deli meats.

I’ve got a puddle of Higgins ink dangerously close to a towering pastrami on rye, and my entire apartment smells of mustard. Outside my window, a sanitation truck is violently reversing down 9th Avenue. The floorboards are vibrating. On my monitor, looking entirely too relaxed for a man navigating the crazy New York City culinary scene, sits Ben Gollan, a fellow Aussie expat making a go of it in the big smoke.

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

Ben’s the undisputed Sandwich Tour King of New York. He runs a wildly successful walking tour company called ‘A Man and His Sandwich’, where he guides people through the absolute best, most artery-clogging delis in the five boroughs. But the thing that always short-circuits my brain about Ben isn’t his encyclopaedic knowledge of cured meats. It’s his backstory.

It’s always deeply comforting to talk to another expat. We spent a significant portion of the hour just being two Australians with thick accents, complaining loudly about the structural inefficiencies of New York City while simultaneously admitting we’d never live anywhere else.

We got into the gritty reality of the New York hustle. If you’re an Aussie expat, you know the exact cultural whiplash we’re talking about. Back home, we have this insidious thing called the tall poppy syndrome. If you try something outside the box, people immediately try to cut you down. Ben mentioned that when he goes back to Australia and tells people he runs sandwich tours, they laugh and ask what his real job is. But here in New York? People look at him and say, “That’s a great idea, I bet you’re the best.”

The city runs on that delusional, infectious encouragement. It’s the only place where a hungover, out-of-work chef from South Africa can stare at leftover Indian paratha bread and some banh mi scraps in his fridge, accidentally invent a pulled-pork paratha taco, and suddenly end up running three wildly lucrative storefronts. (That’s the true story of Goa Taco, by the way. A legendary Lower East Side staple born entirely out of desperation and a hangover).

As I mentioned, Ben’s a fellow expat Australian. Back in Sydney, he was a crisply dressed corporate lawyer working for the government. He traded the courtroom for the chaotic, unforgiving streets of New York back in 2016, all to support his wife’s career. Somewhere along the line, a single pastrami sandwich at a now-defunct East Village deli completely derailed his professional trajectory. He ate the sandwich, had a culinary epiphany, and decided he was going to dedicate his life to the space between two pieces of bread.

There’s something deeply terrifying about abandoning a stable, lucrative law career to yell about sandwiches on a Brooklyn sidewalk. But it’s the kind of unhinged creative pivot I completely admire...

During our Draw Me Anything session, I set myself the absurd task of drawing a photorealistic pastrami sandwich while we talked. I quickly realised that drawing bread’s a nightmare. Bread’s just a chaotic sponge. You try to capture the crust with pilot pen, and it just looks like a diseased rock.

Ben’s got this incredible, magnetic energy. You can see exactly why his tours are perpetually sold out. The live chat was losing its collective mind over his deli recommendations. You could feel the audience getting hungry through the screen…

When Ben’s wife got transferred to the Audible headquarters in New York, Ben followed her with absolutely no plan. He spent his days wandering different neighbourhoods, picking an area based entirely on a sandwich he wanted to try. He started a travel blog read by exactly eight people (mostly his mum and dad). Fast forward a few years, and he’s running sold-out tours five days a week, debating the structural integrity of hot dogs with tourists from all over the world -mainly spending his time in my old stomping ground in the East Village.

Read more

Buy It Now.

I am sitting at my drawing board in my sweltering Manhattan apartment. Grant is sitting in his room in Wichita, Kansas. The contrast between our two environments is immediate and palpable.

His background is calm, lined with books. There is a quiet, steady, midwestern stillness to his frame that makes my own neurotic, constantly vibrating New York energy feel unhinged.

I have been a big fan of Grant’s work for a long time. If you have spent any time on the internet looking for art that makes you feel deeply seen, you’ve likely stumbled across his comics. They’re incredibly insightful, minimalist, and poetic. He manages to take complex, abstract concepts like mindfulness, anxiety, the crushing weight of the creative process, and distil them into beautiful, clean, uncluttered panels.

His style is a brilliant amalgamation of influences, echoing the whimsy of Quentin Blake and the neurotic genius of Roz Chast, yet entirely his own. But there’s a detail about Grant’s life that always manages to short-circuit my brain.

Grant is a practising orthodontist.

By day, he is literalizing the mechanics of human smiles. He operates a medical practice in Wichita. He looks into people’s mouths, adjusts wires, and fixes the geometry of their teeth. And if that wasn’t demanding enough, he also has five kids. He is managing a small, highly energetic army of children, running a medical practice, and somehow still managing to be one of the most prolific and poignant cartoonists I’ve ever met.

When you spend your life as a working artist in a city that charges you fifty dollars just to leave your apartment, you tend to view time as a hostile currency. The idea of holding down a demanding, highly technical medical career while simultaneously producing emotionally resonant art feels impossible.

During our session, I had to ask him how on earth he manages it. Does the day job drain the creative battery, or does it fuel it?

Grant’s answer completely flipped my understanding of creative burnout. He explained that his multifaceted skill set is actually the secret engine of his productivity.

“You need some kind of natural reset button. For me, my job where I straighten teeth and, you know, talk to people and, you know, do some good work is part of that for me”.

It’s a deeply reassuring concept. Instead of draining his creative reserves, his orthodontic work acts as a mental palate cleanser. It engages a completely different, highly analytical, physical part of his brain. When he’s adjusting a bracket on a teenager’s molar, he is not agonising over the narrative arc of a graphic novel. By stepping away from the drawing board to do a job grounded in the physical, real world, he allows his creative side to rest, recharge, and process ideas in the background.

We fell into a deep discussion about this, touching on David Epstein’s brilliant book, Range, which argues that generalists -people with diverse, multifaceted backgrounds and varied experiences- often triumph in a specialised world. I mentioned that I was currently reading Epstein’s other book, Inside the Box, which explores the idea of creative thinking within strict confines.

Read more

I watched the new Devil Wears Prada sequel in New York last night, and it sent me into somewhat of a spiral of existential doom.

The film perfectly captures the precise, terrifying moment an entire industry realises it’s no longer the main character. There is a scene where the characters are forced to reckon with the shifting, digital landscape of modern media. One of them compares the future to the lava of Pompeii, “rushing at us while we just have to let it take what it wants to take.” It is a bleak sentiment, punctuated by the absolute, quiet certainty that one day, it is going to come and smother us all.

Naturally, my brain latched onto this like a barnacle.

I live in Manhattan in an apartment that technically qualifies as a pre-war cupboard, which makes any minor panic feel intensely claustrophobic. I sat at my drafting table this morning, staring at a blank piece of heavy Bristol board. I was surrounded by Hunt 101 nibs and tiny glass bottles of black ink. I was trying to force myself to draw a cartoon. Getting started on anything requires fighting through a thick fog of neurological static..

So, when I hear a fictional character admit that the legacy magazine publisher Elias Clark (Condé Nast) is just the last piece of wood floating next to the Titanic, my immediate internal response is to throw my Blackwing pencils out the window, crawl under the drafting table, and go back to sleep (where Morris is currently curled up, farting loudly.)

I have been working in this industry for more than twenty years. My very first media job was at a local newspaper in Western Australia, breathing in the smell of the offset presses and learning the brutal, beautiful rhythm of daily deadlines. I am a newspaper man through and through; I practically have Higgins ink in my veins. (Yes, I’m a fucking dinosaur.)

I deeply love the traditions of physical print media. I mourn for the era when a reader’s attention wasn’t violently divided a million different ways- fractured by algorithms, endless scrolling, notification badges, and whatever new app Silicon Valley insists we need to survive. I miss the quiet dignity of someone just sitting in a chair, holding a magazine, and looking at one thing at a time.

Now? In the movie, they drop the bomb that someone sold all of Elias Clark, including Runway, to someone else anyway. The giant magazines are dead. The advertisers have the steering wheel. The algorithm is the new Editor-in-Chief. We’re all just scrambling for scraps of attention on the internet.

But there is a friction here, a quiet hypocrisy I try not to look directly at.

I guess I’m mourning the death of print while actively typing this out for a digital newsletter that will be beamed directly into your glowing pocket screen. I am blaming the collapse of the media industry for my blank page, when the truth is much closer to home. It is immensely easier to blame the metaphorical lava of Pompeii than it is to admit I cannot wrangle my own brain into focusing on a single, analogue task for more than twelve minutes without feeling like my skin is vibrating.

In the film, Miranda notes that people should know there is a cost to this life. But she follows it up with a terrifyingly relatable admission. She says, “But boy, I love working. I really do, don’t you?”

That is the trap.

We love the work. The hustle. The doing of the thing. We love the physical scratch of the steel nib on the paper, even when the world seems entirely uninterested in how the sausage is made.

I was sitting there, trying to reconcile the (long-told) ‘death of print’ with my own inability to focus. Morris waddled out of the room, then back in, climbed on my armchair, looked me dead in the eye, and produced a sound from his lower intestine that sounded exactly like a tuba filled with hot soup.

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

The smell hit the air just as my phone violently buzzed on the desk, vibrating its way toward the edge. I lunged to catch the phone, knocking my elbow directly into the open bottle of ink. It tipped perfectly, in excruciating slow motion, launching a glorious arc of permanent, carbon-black fluid toward the newly mopped, jagged wood floor.

It was a beautiful mess. And honestly, it is the perfect metaphor for navigating a creative life right now. You try to hold onto the old ways, you try to protect the institutions, but eventually, a dog passes wind, you panic, and everything gets permanently stained anyway.

The truth is, the print world might be sinking like the Titanic, but complaining about the water temperature does not keep you afloat. We have to learn to swim in the digital ocean, even if it feels completely unnatural. I might struggle to sit down and do the work every day. My brain might constantly beg for a distraction, pleading for anything other than the quiet, monastic discipline of drawing.

But I still love the feeling of working on a piece. Of finishing a piece. I still love the ink. (I just have to figure out how to stop spilling it.)

Thank you to everyone reading this on a screen right now. If you enjoyed reading about my slow descent into analogue madness, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your subscription directly funds my rent, my art supplies, and the industrial-strength cleaning supplies I now desperately need.

Subscribe now

‘til next time!
Your pal,

More pics of my old newspaper office…

ADD IT TO YOUR CALENDAR NOW!

There are very few people in the cartooning world who can make you feel slightly existential with just a few lines of colored pencil and a handful of perfectly chosen words...

is one of those people.

I’ve been a fan of Grant’s work for a long time. If you aren’t already following his Substack, Incidental Comics, you are missing out on one of the most thoughtful, consistent, and visually poetic corners of the internet. You should rectify that immediately.

Incidental Comics

Impossible thoughts and complicated feelings, illustrated. With bonus musings on how to live a creative life.

By Grant Snider

Who is this guy?

For the uninitiated, Grant occupies a very specific niche in the creative ecosystem. He is a prolific illustrator and author whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The Kansas City Star.

But here is the “glitch in the simulation” part of his backstory: Grant is also a practising orthodontist.

By day, he is literalising the mechanics of human smiles in Kansas; by night (and early morning), he is dissecting the mechanics of the creative soul. He lives in the tension between a highly technical medical career and a life of deep, artistic inquiry… I like it a lot.

Grant is about to release a brand new book titled The Year I Stopped Drawing, and you can (and should) pre-order it right now.

It’s a graphic memoir about a creative identity crisis. It follows a year where he stepped away from his usual routines to figure out what actually matters when the “making” stops. As someone who currently spends 90% of my waking life hunched over a drawing board, the premise of this book both gives me hives and a profound sense of curiosity.

I’ve wanted to sit down with Grant for a long time to talk about the “double life” of an artist and how he manages to be so prolific while keeping people’s braces in check.

Save the Date:

We are going live next week for a deep-dive conversation and a live drawing session::

• WHEN: 12:30pm EDT, next Tuesday, 19th May.

• WHERE: Right here on Substack Live.

• ACCESS: The live stream is FREE for everyone to tune in and join the chat.

• THE REPLAY: As always, the full video replay and the deep-dive recap essay will be paywalled for premium subscribers only.

If you want to watch two cartoonists talk shop about the creative process (and see if I can convince him to give me a discount on some Invisalign), mark your calendars…

See you there.

Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

Share

When my friend Nayeema texted to ask me to MC her upcoming live episode for her podcast, “Smart Girl, Dumb Questions”, I was sitting in a Michigan diner scarfing down a slice of cherry pie.

I’d just finished a gig at the Traverse City opera house and had 20 minutes until my next show at a brewery at the end of the street. I’d forgotten to eat, so I was cramming my piehole with literal pie because it was the only thing left in the glass case that I could grab and eat with my hands. I texted her back, “Sure! Who’s the guest?”

When she told me, I did an honest-to-God spit-take. I shot chunks of cherry into my coffee. It looked like my brain had exploded out of my nose. (To be honest, it kind of had.)

To fully grasp the absurdity of this situation, you have to understand exactly who Neil deGrasse Tyson is.

If you’ve ever wondered what he’s like in person, I can confirm that the man does not merely enter a room; he establishes a gravitational orbit.

He isn’t just a scientist; he is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the cosmos. He is a Harvard and Columbia-educated astrophysicist, the long-standing Director of the Hayden Planetarium, the host of Cosmos and StarTalk, the man who unapologetically executed the planetary demotion of Pluto, and arguably the most famous science communicator walking the Earth today.

His brain operates on a galactically terrifying level of physics and mathematics. So, the fact that I -a guy whose primary professional skill involves drawing big noses and writing jokes about the New York subway- was sitting backstage with him, casually shooting the breeze about Australian wildlife and the structural failings of Abraham Lincoln’s stationery choices like we were two old mates at a dive bar, is profoundly fucking insane.

It is a glitch in the simulation, but it’s exactly why I love this job.

So, friend.

The following will be a recollection of the night broken into 3 parts, and will be followed by a second post covering my verbal jousting with the world’s most famous Astrophysicist backstage. You can listen to the full episode, which is out today. Subscribe to Smart Girl, Dumb Questions wherever you listen to or watch podcasts. I’d recommend watching it on YouTube, where you can see the tinfoil absurdity unfold in its full glory.

But first… if you enjoy my work and would like to support, it would mean a lot if you would upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week). It helps me share this work with you and keeps my dog fed. (He’s a hungry boy.)

Part I: The Alien of Extraordinary Ability

There are very few rooms in New York City that possess genuine magic, but the World Famous Comedy Cellar is one of them. There are now three (almost four) different Comedy Cellar Venues in New York, but they’re all haunted by the same flavour of divinely absurd enchantment.

If you’ve never been, it’s exactly what you picture when you think of a legendary stand-up club: It’s subterranean. It’s cramped. The ceiling’s so low you have to duck if you’re over five-nine, and the air always smells faintly of stale beer and old wood. It is my spiritual home in Manhattan, and has been since the first time I set foot in here 20 years ago. Every night of the week, it hosts the best comedians alive, with comedy lineups the envy of every other club on earth.

However. The other night, we weren’t there for a standard comedy lineup… We were there for a very special live taping of the Smart Girl Dumb Questions podcast, with special guest Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Neil is currently launching his new book, “Take Me To Your Leader: Perspectives on First Alien Encounter”, which is a scientifically infused etiquette guide and user’s manual for what to do when we finally make contact with extraterrestrial life. So, naturally, the backstage conversation bypassed the usual polite New York small talk and immediately accelerated into the stratosphere.

Now, I have no knowledge whatsoever of extraterrestrial intelligence. The only reason I was selected to introduce the show and warm up the crowd was probably because my United States Green Card literally classifies me as an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability.” That is the official government designation for a cartoonist, and apparently, it was the only qualification required to open for the world’s most famous astrophysicist.

In the publishing world, the moment an author holds the physical copy of their book for the first time is practically a sacred ritual. Neil’s book had just come off the presses on Friday, and this was his first time seeing the finished Advance Review Copy.

He ran his hands over the cover. “The texture’s great,” he said, entirely ignoring the text. Nayeema, who had brought this heavily dog-eared copy, immediately started grilling him on the premise, pointing out that government accounts constantly seem to be denying their existence.

Neil, waving off the conspiracy theories, explained his stance with the kind of bulletproof logic that only a scientist can casually drop in a green room. He doesn’t need blurry photos or secret files. He just needs biological evidence.

“If anyone has ever in the history of alien sightings brought forth an alien, no one would ever have to ask, ‘Do you believe in aliens?’” he said.

I agreed. He turned to me and asked, “Do you believe in elephants?”

“Oh, I’ve seen elephants in person,” I replied, thinking I was saying something clever.

“Then we don’t have to ask, ‘Do you believe in elephants?’” Neil concluded. He noted that he is perfectly happy to accept the internet’s favourite theory that all the aliens are stockpiled or hidden by the government. “I’m just waiting for them to bring one out. That’s all.”

After a lively interaction featuring a debate over the word marginalia, a discussion about his Montblanc Meisterstück, and an in-person experiment using human skin (seriously, I’m writing up an entirely different post about the backstage malarkey— it’s too much to include in one post.), we got the knock on the door from the producer telling us the audience was loaded in and it was showtime.

We proceeded down the stairs and walked into the showroom. This would be my first ever time ‘performing’ at this Comedy Cellar location. I took the stage to a backing of Star Wars music and looked out across the packed room…

“I don’t know if you guys have been listening every single time an episode drops,” I told the crowd, “But I’ve been so baffled by the insane variety! I mean, Nayeema’s had everyone from Mark Cuban to Esther Perel, Diplo, the Mayor of New York, also the doorman from my old building- and now this Neil fella!?” (Yes, Joe the doorman got an episode. That is the beauty of this show.)

“She’s a year in,” I continued over the cheers. “and she’s already on Spotify’s Top 10 Best New Shows of 2025, an iHeart Award-winner for Best Emerging Pod (over a Kardashian!) Can you imagine what we’re gonna be doing one year from now? This thing is going to be in Madison Square Garden.”

I warbled on for a bit longer before getting the signal that we were ready to go. With the crowd thoroughly razzed, the phones switched to silent, and the stern instructions delivered to tag the podcast in any photos, it was time to bring out the main event.

Nayeema took the stage to roaring applause, looking entirely in her element, and immediately introduced her guest: “The world-renowned astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and our alien daddy... Neil deGrasse Tyson.”

If the backstage banter was any indication, the live show was going to be a high-speed collision of cosmic intellect and absolute absurdity. Nayeema handled the interview masterfully. Interviewing Neil is like trying to put a saddle on a hurricane- you have to let him spin, let him explore the tangents, and then gently guide him back to the thesis. She navigated his cosmic enthusiasm perfectly, keeping the crowd entirely in the palm of her hand.

She didn’t waste any time. “Neil, you know it’s 4/20 tonight,” she said. “Is that right?” Neil replied, his booming voice echoing off the Cellar’s brick walls.

“Are you familiar with the occasion?”

Read more

Hey again, friend.

Welcome to Issue #471 of New York Cartoons! I have a really big story I’m going to share tomorrow morning with paid subscribers- it’s one of the most fucking ridiculous New York experiences I’ve had in my 12 years living here (Hint: The picture above is from the night in question.) Make sure you sign up to get the full thing in the morning.

I’m writing this out on my phone, sitting on the fire escape of my apartment, scarfing a cheese pizza from Don Giovanni, the restaurant below my place…

I was standing out front waiting for my order when a comedian friend walked past to go to the comedy club next door and said, “You know, that restaurant used to be the very first comedy club in the world, right?”

I blinked. He said, “That’s the old Improv. That’s where everybody started back in the day.”

And that’s why the term “brick wall” comedy club exists. Because Bud Friedman, who started it ostensibly for his wife to have a place to perform, couldn’t afford the sheetrock for the walls, so ended up just leaving the exposed brick. Now every comedy club copies that look.

There’s a plaque on the wall explaining more, as well as a list of all the people who started out here. And here I was just thinking they did great wood-fired pizza.

In case you can’t see them, those scrappy lil’ nobodies are: (The NYC scene isn’t quite the sausage fest it was back then.)

Woody Allen, Sandy Baron, Bobby Baxter, John Belushi, Richard Belzer, Sandra Bernhard, Martin Braverman, David Brenner, Albert Brooks, George Carlin, Dick Cavett, Billy Crystal, Larry David, Rodney Dangerfield, Ron Darian, Redd Foxx, David Frye, Marjorie Gross, Andy Kaufman, Robert Klein, Steve Landesberg, David Letterman, Richard Lewis, Jackie Mason, Larry Miller, Eddie Murphy, Bob Nelson, Joe Piscopo, Mike Preminger, Freddie Prinze, Richard Pryor, Gilda Radner, Joan Rivers, Rita Rudner, Mort Sahl, Lenny Schultz, Ronnie Shakes, David Steinberg, Larry Storch, Red Buttons, Lily Tomlin, Jimmie Walker, Robin Williams and what looks like something Nathan Lane glued on last week. (He’s …not a stand-up comic.)

Ok, now I’m back inside my place because it started raining, and Morris has decided to use my leg as a pillow for the rest of my life. I will be writing from here for the foreseeable. Please send water.

By the way, thank you to anyone who reached out this past couple of weeks to tell me they’ve been enjoying specific things I’m writing. It’s always nice to hear from you. Sometimes I see them in Notes, or in the comments of new and old posts. Either way, I really appreciate them. I got a nice one about my gigs in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, from a couple of weeks ago:

I’ve been sitting at the drawing board trying to get work done, but I’m getting nothing done. I can’t imagine why I can’t focus…

He just sits there and judges me for my life choices every moment of the day.

Speaking of dogs, I’ll be drawing YOURS tomorrow with my good pal from at noon. Make sure you sign up for her newsletter to find out when/how to tune in.

The Big News: An NCS Nomination!

Amidst all of this running around, we got some massive news. The National Cartoonists Society has officially nominated our book, “You’re Not A Real Dog Owner Until…”, for Best Book Illustration.

For us ink-stained wretches, this is the absolute peak of the mountain. Making a physical book in the modern publishing era is a miracle of logistics, and Scott and I almost watched this project die in the crib multiple times. We are incredibly proud of this, and incredibly thankful to our agent, Nicole, for being a bulldozer when the publishing labyrinth got dark.

Scott and I spent the day posted up at the front of Framebridge in the West Village, armed with a stack of our new books, You’re Not a Real Dog Owner Until..., and a mountain of Blackwing pencils. We weren’t just there to hawk books, though. We were there raising money for Rain or Shine Rescue, an incredible organisation that helps foster dogs and find them forever homes.

We are still doing custom dog sketches directly into the pages of the book. You can order one right now, and we will draw your weird, beautiful, neurotic dog and ship it straight to your door.

WANT TO GET YOUR DOG DRAWN IN THE BOOK? CLICK HERE.

I’m doing a show at The PIT on 29th/Park on Wednesday night. You should come! Here are the details, and the creepy AI-face of mine they put on the flyer…

For Episode #48 of Draw Me Anything, the brilliant Nishant Jain (The Sneaky Artist) came down from Canada. We sat in the loudest, most chaotic intersection on Earth and drew the crowd live. We somehow ended up deep in a conversation about French philosophy, the AI Slop-Machine, and the radical act of paying attention. Watch the full 50-minute replay and read the essay here.

And look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads!

Share

If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $1 per week).

Subscribe now

The Sketchbook I’m sharing with you this week is a selection of the sketches I did of peoples’ dogs as gifts this past week at Artists & Fleas in Brooklyn. If you have a friend with a dog, send me a photo and I’ll draw them into the book for you.

Click here to get started

If you’re new here, or you haven’t had a moment to wander back through the archives of profound genius I’ve shared up to this point, take a peek at the following scribblings:

If you want to know how my Saturday started, I can summarise it in a single, deeply aggravating sentence…

I arrived at FedEx at 9:30AM to pick up our event signage, only to find the doors locked, the lights off, and not a single soul inside. There is a very particular type of panic that sets in when you are scheduled to host a live event in Manhattan in less than an hour, and your entire visual display is trapped behind corporate glass. After a frantic scramble and some aggressive tapping on my phone, I managed to pay a bike messenger to go back at 10am and race the signage down the West Side Highway. It arrived with mere minutes to spare. Because the show, as they say, must go on.

Scott and I spent the day posted up at the front of Framebridge in the West Village, armed with a stack of our new books, You’re Not a Real Dog Owner Until..., and a mountain of Blackwing pencils. We weren’t just there to hawk books, though. We were there raising money for Rain or Shine Rescue, an incredible organisation that helps foster dogs and find them forever homes.

Our job for the day? Signing the books and sketching people’s dogs directly onto the title pages, live and on the spot, using the lock-screens and camera rolls of the people standing in front of us.

Despite the morning logistical nightmare, it was pretty fantastic. We had a non-stop line the entire day. People brought their own rescue pups to the table, neighbourhood regulars stopped by, and we spent hours doing our absolute favourite thing in the world: drawing dogs and talking to the people who are also obsessed with them.

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

When you spend an entire day drawing New Yorkers’ dogs from their owners’ phones, you start to notice a few undeniable truths:

• The 8,000 Photo Disclaimer: No dog owner will ever just show you one photo of their dog. They will scroll through an album of 8,000 nearly identical photos, furiously apologising because “he’s usually way cuter than this, wait, let me find the one of him in the little sweater from last Tuesday...”

  

• The Convergence Theory is Real: It is a cliché, but it is true: New Yorkers eventually morph into their dogs. I drew a Wirehaired Pointing Griffon for a guy in a tweed blazer, and I swear to God they both looked like they taught philosophy at NYU.

• The Neurotic Stare: Every single rescue dog in Manhattan has a very unique look in its eyes. It’s a mix of deep, soulful gratitude and the vibrating, existential anxiety of a creature that has to trot past a screeching garbage truck every morning to pee. They are the perfect muses.

Of course, because it’s New York in the spring, the sky eventually decided to open up. We got rained out, frantically grabbed our easels and books, and shuffled the entire operation inside the Framebridge store. Twenty minutes later, the sun came back out, and we dragged the whole circus right back onto the sidewalk.

It was chaotic, it was exhausting, and it was the most fun we’ve had in months. We are absolutely going to do it again soon.

But here is the best part: if you couldn’t make it to the West Village to stand in line while it rained, you don’t have to miss out. We are still doing custom dog sketches directly into the pages of the book. You can order one right now, and we will draw your weird, beautiful, neurotic dog and ship it straight to your door.

WANT TO GET YOUR DOG DRAWN IN THE BOOK?

ORDER YOURS HERE

A huge thank you to everyone who came out to Bank Street, braved the weather, and helped us raise money for Rain or Shine Rescue. If you’d like to donate to them, you can do so here.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

Share

As usual, and I could have talked for another four hours, and there is so much to cover here. Writing up this recap was really difficult because I could have gone for 20,000 words; I had to pare it down. So, I’m going to break it into four parts today…

As always, if you want to watch the full replay, please upgrade To Paid. I really appreciate your support.

Subscribe now

If you want to test the absolute limits of your nervous system, try sitting in the middle of Times Square with a sketchbook, a pen, and an open microphone...

It is a sensory assault. It does not smell like inspiration; it smells like roasted nuts, diesel exhaust, and the sweat of ten thousand tourists realising they’ve lost their Marriott room key. The noise is a physical weight. Sirens, pedicabs aggressively looping Alecia Keys, and people dressed as off-brand Spider-Man aggressively demanding five dollars for a photo.

“Drawing in New York is combat journalism. You’re trying to capture lightning in a bottle while the bottle is being kicked down Broadway by a guy screaming at his phone.”

But this is exactly why I do this. When I started New York Cartoons, the core promise to you, the reader, was that I wasn’t just going to send you polished, sterile drawings from the safety of an air-conditioned studio. The promise was to show you what living, surviving, and creating in New York City actually looks like. The chaos, the invisible labour, and the absurd encounters that fuel the work.

So, for this week’s episode of Draw Me Anything, I took the studio to the street!

My guest was the brilliant Nishant Jain, better known to his massive audience as The Sneaky Artist. Nishant came down from Canada to sit with me in the blistering epicentre of Manhattan. For an hour, amidst the absolute bedlam of Times Square, we drew the chaos in real-time.

Before the stream started, a tall man holding a brown paper bag whipped towards us before locking eyes with me… it was, of course, my neighbour and pal . Because of course it was. (You can see his SYML entry here.) When I introduced him to Nishant, I’d mentioned we were nerding out about Derrida last time we spoke. When he asked who that was, I knew he’d be in for an education… Nishant gave him a primer on the arsehole French philosopher and his musings. I could see the hamster in Anthony’s brain begin to sweat, then die in a mad panic. Derrida: It’s one helluva conversation starter.

What started as a live drawing session quickly spiralled into one of the most profound, quotable, and vital conversations I’ve had in years. We talked about everything from French philosophy and the existential threat of tech companies to the mindfulness of observation and the stark contrast between Canadian politeness and New York velocity.

Here’s what happens when you put two process-junkies in the loudest intersection on Earth…

Part I: Vancouver VS. New York

There’s a distinct difference in the way a New Yorker observes the world versus the way a Canadian does, and watching Nishant work was a masterclass in pacing.

Nishant possesses a terrifying level of calm. He didn’t fight the chaos. He observed it. He mentioned how different the nature of New Yorkers VS Canadians is, and how he’s adapted from his roots:

“This has happened to me over the last two years, it's default for me every time, at least this is true for Vancouver. Every time a person from Vancouver gets off the bus, even if it's like one of those long buses, so they can't hear you, everyone says thank you to the bus driver. Everyone.”

Drawing in New York is combat journalism. You’re trying to capture lightning in a bottle while the bottle is being kicked down Broadway by a guy screaming at his phone.

But despite the velocity of the city, Nishant’s process is startlingly deliberate. As we talked, he casually built what would become a beautifully complex drawing of the scene. He wasn’t rushing. He was practising what he calls the radical act of paying attention.

"Be moved by this moment. The drawing in Times Square has to have the vibrations of Times Square. So you've got to move to the peaks of this place. The annoying music, the sirens, the power horns, they're all part of it."

Part II: The Mindfulness of the Pen, and the Radical Act of Paying Attention

We spend so much of our time talking about “mindfulness” as this sterile, corporate buzzword. (I’ve written about this before) Tech companies have commodified it. They sell us apps that ding to remind us to breathe, which we check on the same glowing rectangles that are actively destroying our attention spans.

Nishant’s approach to drawing is the exact antidote to this. For him, drawing isn’t about producing a piece of “content” for an algorithm. It is a grounding mechanism.

“Drawing isn’t about making a pretty picture,” Nishant said, his pen moving carefully across the paper.

“Like, you can pass through the world with your phone, and you can very easily take photos without paying attention. So you're not giving, paying attention literally, as in paying something, like you have to give time and have to look with your senses. So drawing is a call to do that and to be present to listen to the sounds"

That hit me like a freight train. In the digital mailstrom, we take thousands of photos we will never look at again. We consume the world in half-second swipes. But when you drag a pen across watercolour paper, you’re making a physical record of time spent. You are saying, I was here, and I paid attention.

"Your body and mind are absorbed in the union of an ask, which is to look to interpret and then to put it down, translate it, and in a lot of ways, you shut out a lot of concerns, you stop thinking about time, you stop thinking about your responsibilities of service, and you're just here for a while."

If you’re a free reader, now is the time to upgrade.

A subscription costs less than a bad bodega sandwich, and it directly funds the real, human, unapologetic art that the tech companies are actively trying to automate out of existence. Support the artists who are actually paying attention.

Please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

Part III: Derrida, Language, and the AI Plagiarism Machine

Naturally, sitting in the glowing neon Mecca of American capitalism, the conversation pivoted to the tech overlords and the looming shadow of Generative AI.

If you read my essays, you know my stance on the “AI Slop Machine.” I view it as a cultural parasite. But Nishant brought a deeply intellectual, philosophical lens to the conversation that completely reframed the issue for me. He brought up Jacques Derrida.

For those who skipped French Philosophy in college, Derrida was the father of “deconstruction.” He famously argued that language isn’t just a tool we use to describe reality; language creates the boundaries of our reality. We can only understand the world through the vocabulary we have to describe it.

"The point of AI is not to make articles; the point of AI is to make an endlessly spinning mill of content to feed their social media algorithms to hypnotise and make you into addicts so that you become a passive consumer instead of a creative"

He paused to add a shadow to the drawing of an awning.

“If Derrida is right -if language shapes our reality- then handing our visual and written language over to a machine is incredibly dangerous. How colonisation works right, you convince people that their work is worthless and then you steal it from them, and then you sell it back to them on a subscription, and you dehumanise craft and creativity until nothing is left.”

This is the exact problem with AI art. It looks perfect at first glance, but it contains absolutely zero humanity. It has no point of view. It doesn’t know what it feels like to sit on a cold metal chair in Times Square while a siren blares in your left ear.

"artistic inspiration and inspiration from the world is not just the ambit of the professional artist right this is an essential human job yeah this is part of being human."

Part IV: The Finished Masterpiece

By the end of the 50-minute conversation, my own drawings were a frantic, scratchy, high-energy reflection of the anxiety of Times Square. It looked like New York feels.

But then Nishant held up his sketchbook.

I actually stopped talking for a second. Look at that, I said on the stream. It was incredible. This guy had just casually, while dissecting French deconstructionism and the ethics of tech conglomerates, built the most insanely beautiful drawing of the intersection.

It wasn’t just a rendering of buildings and tourists. It had life in it. You could see the deliberate choices he made -what to include, more importantly, what to leave out, what to emphasise. It was the absolute antithesis of an AI-generated image. It was a physical artefact of a human being paying deep, mindful attention to a chaotic world.

Watch the Full Replay…

Reading these quotes and clips is only half the experience. If you want to actually see the process -if you want to hear the sirens, see the pen hit the paper in real-time, and watch two working artists navigate the muck of New York City while talking about the survival of human art, you need to watch the replay.

This is the promise of New York Cartoons. I don’t hide the process. I don’t put a filter on the reality of this job. The full, uncut, 50-minute video replay of our Times Square drawing session is available right now for paid subscribers.

Read more

I pay a genuinely offensive sum of money every month to live in the loudest, most aggressively overstimulating city on the planet.

I live in Hell’s Kitchen, where the ambient noise is just a relentless, looping soundtrack of screaming sirens (and humans) and yellow Caterpillars scraping concrete. Yet, because my executive function operates like a squirrel trapped in a wheelie bin, I spend 90% of my time hunched over a drawing board next to the window, clutching a Blackwing like it is a life raft.

It occurred to me recently that calling this publication New York Cartoons is a bit fraudulent if I never actually show you around New York. I am just a guy drawing in a box.

So today, I am fixing that…

I am dragging the Draw Me Anything broadcast out of my apartment and into the absolute neon belly of the beast. I am going to Times Square. At 1:00 pm Eastern Time, I will be out there with my sketchpad, sitting entirely unprotected, surrounded by tourists having mid-holiday meltdowns and bootleg superheroes demanding five-dollar bills.

TUNE IN LIVE AT 1PM

And I am not doing it alone. I have coerced my good friend and repeat guest, , into the chaos. You know him as The Sneaky Artist. We have been in the trenches together for a while now. We are just two exhausted immigrant artists trying to make this whole thing work without getting deported or losing our minds.

Nishant started from India and ended up in Canada, and I dragged myself from Australia to the US. Whenever we get together, the conversation refuses to stay on track. We will be out there in the middle of a pedestrian plaza, clutching our pens, pivoting wildly from the mechanics of cross-hatching to the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, all while actively dodging rogue pedicabs and the smell of roasting nuts.

It is a terrible place to concentrate.

Times Square is a monument to sensory overload. It’s the birthplace of a million unhinged stories. We will be observing the absurdity, making horrific jokes, and drawing whatever you throw at us, live in the middle of the madness. Bring your prompts, bring your questions about philosophy or pen angles, and watch us try to maintain focus amid the mailstrom.

Tune in live at 1:00pm US EDT TODAY!

Join here

‘til then…
Your pal,

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

May 11th, 2020
New York, NY

For nearly a decade, I've furnished my entire apartment with crap I found on the sidewalk.

It's called Stooping, and it's one of the most underrated things about living in New York.

Not to be confused with schtooping, Stooping is taking shit that people throw out of their apartments and bringing it into your apartment (after cleaning it thoroughly.)

Some people make a full-time profession out of it and drive around different parts of New York with a trailer on their car, piling in stuff they can flip on eBay like some kind of Gary V acolyte.

After years of stooping, I discovered that there was an Instagram account called @StoopingNYC which alerted New Yorkers to really great shit that was being left out on the sidewalk for anyone to take.

Share

I honestly didn’t purchase a single piece of new furniture for about seven years after moving to Manhattan. 

The only thing that was in my apartment when I moved in with a large old rolltop writing desk. It was left there by the deceased previous tenant who happened to be the poet laureate of the Lower East Side.

I have vivid memories of piling into my grandfather's old car, trailer attached, trawling the neighbourhood for treasure on bulk rubbish collection day. He was a fixer-upper guy.

His first instinct when he needed a tool or a car part wasn’t to order it new: he’d go to scrap yards, even the tip, and more often than not he’d come home with the thing he needed.

His backyard shed, which smelled of rope, grease, and old paint was full of things he'd found and fixed; a deeply entrenched habit borne of living in a post-war depression. He and my grandma lived through that horizonless period when you had to stretch every penny as far as it would go.

I remember him saying, “Waste not, want not.” and “Wealth is the money you don’t spend.” It worked, too! He and my grandma saved up enough each year to go on an overseas trip.

I inherited this instinct. However, my generation now lives in an unprecedented era of planned obsolescence: A perpetual firehose of consumer convenience where it takes so much trouble to repair something that it’s "cheaper to just buy a new one."

The pandemic-era stooping boom

During the pandemic, my neighborhood had to play the morbid game of ‘Dead or Fled’. (I heard an old guy coin that term while he was poking through piles of new-looking furniture with his walking stick.)

Moving vans lined every street of the East Village for months. There were literally hundreds of mattresses on the sidewalk. Some would blow onto the road and block traffic.

I would play the Billy Joel song “Movin’ out!”1 on my phone to keep things light as I walked past the giant piles of new and used furniture that were left after residents hastily fled Manhattan. (Or, sadly, died.)

We agreed to only take stuff that looks like it once belonged to an NYU student who moved home. There were still unscrupulous people taking old family photo albums and heirlooms. Who would stoop so low?

I would mask up and walk the dog around the neighbourhood twice a day, and I’d somehow come home with another armful of crap. I noodled through the piles alone and would be saying to passing strangers, something like “Can you believe someone threw this out?!”.

One in, One out.

The rule, however, was born of living in a tiny Manhattan apartment: One in: One out. If I lugged something home, and somehow got it up the 5 flights of stairs, I had to pick something else to jettison from the apartment lest we be featured on an episode of Hoarders.

til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

Share

The National Cartoonists Society has officially nominated our book for Best Book Illustration.

For us ink-stained scribblers, an NCS nomination is the peak of the mountain. But the truth is, this book almost died in the crib. Scott and I spent many, many months hunched over piles of paper, grinding out the comedy and the artwork, and there were several distinct moments when it looked like this thing would never see the light of day. Making a physical book in the modern publishing era is a fucking mind-boggling miracle of logistics.

The only reason you’re able to hold this book in your hands right now is because of the insane amount of energy of Scott and me to will it into existence, and the sheer, unadulterated tenacity of our agent, Nicole Resciniti at the Seymour Agency. When the publishing labyrinth got dark, Nicole became a bulldozer. She fought for this project, she championed our work, and we are incredibly proud to finally share the result with you.

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

Of course, in this industry, the churn never stops. We are already back in the trenches. Next up is “You’re Not A Real Parent Until…” coming out this Fall, followed by “You’re Not A Real New Yorker Until…” dropping in Fall 2027. Stay tuned for more on the launch, because we are going to be making a lot of noise about them.

But speaking of the hustle, you don’t have to wait until the Fall to watch us sweat…

This weekend, Scott and I are dragging our pens, ink, and a stack of these newly nominated books across the river to Artists & Fleas in Williamsburg (70 North 7th St). We’ll be set up in the market from Friday through Sunday.

If you haven’t been to Artists & Fleas, it’s a brilliant, chaotic hub of independent makers, vintage curators, and Brooklyn creatives. We aren’t just going to be sitting behind a table hawking books, either. We’re bringing the studio to the market floor.

Bring us your weird, neurotic, beautiful dogs!

We will be doing live, custom dog portraits on the spot, and we will be drawing your dog directly into the physical pages of the book right in front of you. It’s part live art, part comedy crowd-work, and entirely a spectator sport

Come down to Williamsburg this weekend. Buy a book, immortalise your dog, and watch us ply our trade in the wild.

See you out there.
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something nice for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

Share

September 10, 2025
Midtown, New York

Tonight, I was invited to the Al Hirschfeld reception at the Algonquin Hotel, home of the famous Algonquin Round Table. We were celebrating both the new poster book about Hirschfeld’s work on Sondheim shows and the collection of his iconic work. This is the first NYC gallery showing of Al Hirschfeld’s work in over a decade.

I grew up poring over Hirschfeld’s work, tracing his lines with my eyes, learning how much you can do by leaving most of it out. To stand in the Algonquin, where he once drew his peers, and be surrounded by his work alongside people I know—it reminds me this is exactly why I moved here. To be around it, learn from it, absorb it, and (hopefully) get better.

Declared a Living Landmark in 1996 and a Living Legend by the Library of Congress in 2000, Al Hirschfeld’s work has appeared in every major publication of the last 9 decades, including his 75 years in the New York Times. He was undeniably the greatest caricaturist New York has ever produced (even if he didn’t consider himself one… He called himself a characterist, which isn’t a word.)

But I digress. Here was a man who could make an entire performance materialise with a single swoopy line, scratched out laboriously from the sublime comfort of an old Koken barber’s chair.

As the throng of collectors and donors shmoozed and kibitzed, David Leopold, the Hirschfeld Foundation’s creative director, spoke with his usual mix of scholarship and showmanship. He’s the keeper of the archive, the guy who knows where all the NINAs are hidden.

I, meanwhile, was quietly bleeding in the corner. Somewhere while walking the three avenues from my apartment, I’d manage to jab myself with a golf pencil I’d stuffed in my pocket. I walked the Oak Room sucking my bleeding thumb like a child, trying to look like someone who belonged at an art opening while also staunching the world’s most persistent paper-cut. In my Larry David version of events, the blood would have landed on a priceless original Hirschfeld. Luckily, it just smeared on my copy of the new book (cover below).

I ran into Charlie Kochman, editor-in-chief of Abrams ComicArts—the publisher behind Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and the very book that was being launched tonight. We caught up before he bumped into his childhood friend, John Leguizamo, who was holding court like only John Leguizamo can. It was one of those surreal New York nights where you realise you’ve accidentally wandered into someone else’s anecdote.

Read more

Get more from Jason Chatfield in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

If you try to launch a print humour magazine in the 21st century, most financial advisors will tell you to just set your money on fire instead; it’s faster, it requires less paperwork, and it keeps you warmer in the winter.

We live in the era of the digital churn. We live in an ecosystem where corporate media conglomerates are continuously gutting their editorial staff, pivoting to video, pivoting away from video, pivoting to AI slop, and generally treating the written word and the drawn cartoon as disposable ephemera. The conventional wisdom is that print is dead…

But!

…if you’ve been reading this newsletter for more than five minutes, you know I’m obsessed with the messy, unglamorous back-end of making a living as an artist. I love pulling back the curtain on the creatives who look at the “churn,” laugh, and figure out how to keep the lights on without selling their souls to the algorithm.

This week on Draw Me Anything, I brought in a guy who looked at a sinking ship and decided to build his own lifeboat.

I was thrilled to host the brilliant . Michael is the publisher, editor, and mastermind behind The American Bystander, a publication that Newsweek literally called “the last great humour magazine.”

The American Bystander's Viral Load

Funny writing from The American Bystander, "the world's best print humor magazine."

By Michael Gerber

During the stream, we dug into exactly how you resurrect a print humour magazine in the 21st century without setting mountains of corporate cash on fire. It is a story of grit, absurd luck, and a publishing model that bypasses the corporate overlords entirely. But before we get to the Chinese oligarchs and the naked Kickstarter launch, we have to go back to a very small room in the One World Trade Centre…

Sam Gross, The Everest of Cartooning & the Mouse in the Car

My introduction to The American Bystander didn’t happen on a newsstand. It happened in the absolute epicentre of the New York cartooning world.

It was late 2014, maybe early 2015. I was a relatively new immigrant to America, still trying to figure out the brutal mechanics of the New York publishing scene. To my brain, the ultimate peak of the industry -the absolute Everest of cartooning- was getting into MAD Magazine and getting into The New Yorker. Those were the twin pillars of the comedy art world. Everything else was just scenery.

Related Reading:

I was sitting at The New Yorker in the Cartoon Lounge. (Let’s be honest; it wasn’t really a “lounge”. It was a small box off to the side from where cartoon editor Bob Mankoff’s office was. But the physical space didn’t matter, because of who was in said box.

The legendary Sam Gross was sitting in the room. He was in a chair, positioned right below a giant framed picture of his classic cartoon, the one with the mouse driving the wind-up car. If you’re a cartoonist, sitting in a room with Sam Gross is like a guitarist sitting in a room with Keith Richards.

Related Reading:

Sam was holding a copy of a magazine I had never seen before. “Kid, have you heard of this magazine?” he asked me. I looked at the cover. The unmistakable, beautiful line work of Arnie Roth stared back at me. It was Issue Number Six. “I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t heard of it,” I admitted.

Sam started explaining what it was, and as he flipped through the pages to show me the cartoons, my jaw hit the floor. I was looking at a murderers’ row of comedy art. “This is everyone I love,” I remember thinking. “These are all my favourite cartoonists in here. What the hell? How long has this thing been around?”

Sam saw the absolute shock on my face. “Yeah, right?” he smirked. “You should submit to this.”

Naturally, the moment he said that, the impostor syndrome kicked in with the weight of a freight train. I was so completely enamoured with this magazine, yet I had absolutely no idea it even existed. When I told this story to Michael on the stream, he just laughed. “Well, that’s kind of the story of the business right there,” he said…

Fast forward to today, and I am deeply proud to not only be a contributor to The Bystander but to have now hosted its “re-founder” to talk about exactly how this impossible publication came to exist.

The Trifecta and the Pitch

To understand The American Bystander, you have to understand the pedigree of the people who originally conceived it…

Back in 2012, Michael was approached by a comedy legend named Brian McConnachie, along with his friend and senior writer Alan Goldberg.

If you don’t know the name Brian McConnachie, you know his work. As Michael explains on the stream, Brian possesses what is arguably the holy grail of comedy resumes. “He’s the only person I know who worked for the original National Lampoon in the first five years,” Michael said. “And then SNL from ‘76 to ‘80. And then SCTV, like ‘80 to ‘82. So he’s the only person I know that has that sort of trifecta.”

Brian and Alan came to Michael with an idea: they wanted to do an old-fashioned radio show. They envisioned something akin to the legendary National Lampoon Radio Hour. They knew Michael was a bit of a wild card in the publishing world, so they pitched him the concept.

But Michael saw the logistical hurdles. “I don’t know how that business works,” he told them. “But I will tell you this, that if we do a magazine, you’ll get a podcast.” It was a brilliant bait-and-switch. The guys were intrigued. “All right,” they asked, “well, how would you do a magazine?”

This is where his unique background came into play. He’d spent years developing a highly specific, ultra-lean publishing model during his time running the Yale Record and studying college humour magazines. He understood the scrappy shoestring reality of getting physical pages printed.

At the time, Michael was just recovering from an illness that had plagued him for decades. He had no idea if he physically had the stamina to actually run a full-scale mag. So, he made them a deal: he’d use his lean publishing knowledge to put together a magazine “dummy” -a physical prototype of what the publication could look like- and hand it over to them to run with.

“I’ll give it to you,” Michael told them. “And then you can do what you want.” They agreed. The dummy was built. Now, they just needed the money.

The $5 Million Pitch & the Chinese Oligarchs

If you want to start a massive media venture the conventional way, you need capital. Usually, that means walking into a boardroom in Manhattan and asking for a ridiculous sum of money with a straight face.

Michael, Brian, and Alan tried to do exactly that. “We tried to get somebody to give us, you know, $5 million…” Michael explained. What followed was one of the most absurd, hilarious, and deeply questionable funding negotiations in publishing history. They found a potential investor who claimed he could secure the $5 million they needed because he was “in tight with a bunch of Chinese oligarchs.”

There was, however, a catch. And it was a massive, legally questionable catch. The investor told them he would hand over the money, but only under one condition: “If you put a bunch of the sons of Chinese oligarchs on your magazine masthead to give them H-1B visas.”

So. The future of the last great American humour magazine was resting on a geopolitical immigration fraud scheme designed to sneak the children of Chinese billionaires into the United States under the guise of being comedy editors…

As a guy who had to jump through a million legal hoops to get my own visa as an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability,” hearing this made me laugh out loud. And the wildest part? They said yes.

When you’re trying to get a print publication off the ground, morals occasionally take a back seat to capital. But alas, the shady international visa ring was not meant to be. The deal fell through at the very last minute. The oligarchs vanished, the $5 million disappeared, and the guys were left standing in a room with a magazine dummy and zero cash.

Michael handed Brian and Alan the dummy he had built. “Okay, here you go,” he told them. “Here’s a magazine. I’m going to go off and do something else.” Michael realised that if this magazine was going to survive, he was going to have to steer the ship himself. “Okay,” he said, “well then let me run it.”

The Shower Launch

With the $5 million oligarch funding dead in the water, Michael made a massive pivot. He decided to abandon the traditional corporate funding route entirely. Instead of begging rich guys for money, he decided to take the magazine directly to the people who would actually read it.

“I said to them, well, I think we could at least try to do one issue via Kickstarter,” Michael said. They approached it not as a recurring periodical but as a one-off project. “That first issue is like a book because we thought it was a one-off,” Michael explained.

It was October 2015. Michael had the Kickstarter page built and ready to go. He had absolutely no idea whether the internet was going to care about a print humour magazine.

The moment he actually launched the campaign is a piece of publishing legend...

“I remember I was jumping in the shower,” Michael laughed on the stream. “So I was stark naked when I hit Go on the Kickstarter… and I thought either this is like a really good omen or a really terrible omen.” He pressed launch, naked, dripping wet, and hoped for the best.

It was a very good omen.

The campaign didn’t just fund; it funded very fucking quickly. The hunger for real, human-made, high-quality comedy art was palpable. People threw their money at the project. But the success immediately bred a brand new, terrifying problem for Michael. “We funded, and we funded quickly,” Michael said. “And then people are like, ‘When’s issue two coming out?’ And I’m like, okay, I guess I’m running a magazine now.”

Bypassing the Corporate Overlords

That was 11 years ago. For a print magazine to survive over a decade in the current media climate is nothing short of a miracle. But The Bystander didn’t just survive; it thrived because he refused to play by the broken rules of the corporate magazine industry.

During our chat, Michael broke down exactly why the traditional publishing model is a doomed, rotting dinosaur. For decades, massive media conglomerates relied on a very specific “three-legged stool” to keep their magazines afloat. “The corporate magazine model is back in the day; it was essentially, you’d try to break even on your newsstand sales,” he said.

That was step one.

Step two was to actively haemorrhage money on subscriptions. If you’ve ever wondered why you used to get offers in the mail for a year of Esquire or Sports Illustrated for the price of a cup of coffee, it was entirely by design.

“You’d lose money on your subscriptions,” Michael noted. “Like Esquire will give you a year for $9 or whatever.” Why would a business actively lose money selling its own product? Because of step three:

The advertisers. (oof)

By practically giving the magazine away for free, the publishers could artificially inflate their subscriber numbers (known in the industry as the “rate base”). They would then take that massive, bloated number to Madison Avenue and charge advertisers exorbitant rates for full-page spreads.

“Your rate base from your newsstand sales and your subscriptions would be high enough that whatever profit you make come from your advertisers,”

The entire industry was a shell game. It wasn’t built on delivering great art to readers; it was built on delivering eyeballs to advertisers. And the moment the internet came along and advertisers realised they could target readers directly via Facebook and Google algorithms, the magazine industry’s three-legged stool completely collapsed.

The American Bystander said, “To hell with all of that!”

Michael’s model bypasses the corporate overlords and the advertisers entirely. It is a direct-to-reader, crowdfunded, subscriber-supported lifeboat. There are no ad executives dictating content. There are no SEO managers telling the cartoonists to optimise their jokes for the Google algorithm.

“The model is ballsy,” I told him during the stream. And it is. It relies entirely on the premise that if you put the greatest comedy writers and the greatest cartoonists in the world into a beautifully designed, high-quality physical object, people will actually pay for it.

The Slow Food of Comedy

Listening to him detail the survival of The Bystander was the exact antidote I needed after weeks of reading about generative AI and the death of media. (I know I write about it a lot too— I’m part of the problem. Sorry.)

The Bystander is the “slow food” of comedy. We talked about this a bit. It takes time. It costs real money. It is printed on actual, tactile paper. And it requires a reader to sit down, disconnect from the endless scrolling slot machine of their phone, and actually engage with the work.

We’re living in an era where tech companies are trying to convince us that art is just “content” to be generated by a machine in 0.4 seconds. But as Michael and the entire roster of Bystander contributors prove, you can’t automate a joke. You can’t code a machine to replicate the smell of fresh ink on a page, or the decades of brutal, bombing nights at open mics it takes to find a punchline.

The Bystander is proof that if you stop trying to sound like everyone else on the internet, and just build something you actually care about, people will eventually find you.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

Share

The MTA is currently demanding a standing ovation because they finally figured out how to let us tap our phones on a piece of plastic to enter a subterranean tube that smells like a wet golden retriever that just rolled around in warm Chinatown garbage. Meanwhile, tech billionaires are testing “silent” air taxis over the Hudson River. What a time to be alive.

So this West Coast startup, Joby Aviation, is running test flights out of the West 30th Street Heliport just east of my old building right now. You know, that place near the pickleball courts where the “Blade” helicopters get you to JFK in 5 minutes while whistling the Succession theme in your head?

Their PR department is aggressively claiming their electric aircraft is “revolutionary” because it operates at exactly 65 decibels. They describe this volume as the exact equivalent of a “normal conversation.”

Whoever wrote that press release has clearly never spoken to a human being in Manhattan. A normal conversation in Hell’s Kitchen starts at 95 decibels and involves two people screaming at each other over a reversing rubbish truck about what is and isn’t Mamdani’s fault. Sixty-five decibels is not a conversation. Sixty-five decibels is a hostage negotiation. It’s a terrified whisper shared by two people on the subway.

I don’t think we’re worried about the ‘noise’ of these things…

It’s the perfect distillation of New York absurdity. We now have sci-fi hover-taxis for venture capitalists who simply can’t bear the existential dread of sitting in traffic on the Van Wyck. They get to float through the clouds like silent, wealthy ghosts. And the rest of us? We’re down in the darkness, furiously tapping our Apple Pay to OMNY screens twelve times, trapped in a metal tube under the East River, listening to a garbled voice from the moon announce a “mechanical issue”. (Seriously, the Artemis II transmissions from the fucking moon were clearer than the ones from the front of the subway carriage.)

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

If you ask anyone actually standing on the pavement, we don’t want a silent helicopter. We just want a bus from Port Authority to JFK that doesn’t have sticky seats, doesn’t smell like discarded chicken bones, and actually departs before the heat death of the universe.

Anyway. Just wanted to gripe.
I didn’t sleep well last night.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

Share

Hey again, friend.

Welcome to Issue #470 of New York Cartoons. As I’m writing this, my brain is throbbing from a week of live drawing events, and I’m still reeling from the Traverse City Comedy Festival I attended last week.

I’m still writing up the recap of each incredible day, which I’ll be publishing in the coming week. But in the meantime, keep an eye out for my recap of my conversation yesterday with (editor of ). It was a really interesting chat.

Aaanyway, Here are some of my diary entries from my adventures in The Mitten…

Day 1:

Day 2:

Day 3:

Stay tuned for the final big day… including a performance at an opera house theatre and a private lunch with Gary Gulman!

The Sketchbook I’m sharing with you this week is a portrait done for the Waking Up App. I like Robin, and this was a really good chat. You can listen here.

The MTA is currently demanding a standing ovation.

They finally figured out how to let us tap our phones on a piece of plastic to enter a subterranean tube that smells like a wet golden retriever that just rolled around in warm Chinatown garbage. Meanwhile, tech billionaires are testing “silent” air taxis over the Hudson River. What a time to be alive.

So this West Coast startup, Joby Aviation, is running test flights out of the West 30th Street Heliport just east of my old building right now. You know, that place near the pickleball courts where the “Blade” helicopters get you to JFK in 5 minutes while whistling the Succession theme in your head?

Their PR department is aggressively claiming their electric aircraft is “revolutionary” because it operates at exactly 65 decibels. They describe this volume as the exact equivalent of a “normal conversation.”

Whoever wrote that press release has clearly never spoken to a human being in Manhattan. A normal conversation in Hell’s Kitchen starts at 95 decibels and involves two people screaming at each other over a reversing rubbish truck about what is and isn’t Mamdani’s fault. Sixty-five decibels is not a conversation. Sixty-five decibels is a hostage negotiation. It’s a terrified whisper shared by two people on the subway.

I don’t think we’re worried about the ‘noise’ of these things…

If you caught my chat with Sarah Elizabeth Hill, you know we didn’t bother with small talk. We dove straight into the deep end.

Sarah writes, produces, and runs Bobi Media. She took $400 and built it into an agency that works with Oscar winners, Deepak Chopra, and brands you see on billboards. On paper, it looks like she just levitated to the top of New York media. Spoiler: nobody floats in this city. You claw your way up, or you get chewed up.

Sarah didn’t sugarcoat the human cost of the hustle. She talked about the time the grind nearly broke her completely:

“I was working so much I wasn’t leaving my desk... I hadn’t developed my habits and so was hospitalised, because I couldn’t get my brain to stop spinning.”

Keep reading/watching below:

I was invited to a screening of a new movie…

It is titled The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist and is directed brilliantly by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell. The premise is incredibly simple and deeply terrifying. Roher is expecting his first child. He wants to know exactly what kind of world his kid is going to inherit, so he takes a camera and interviews the leading artificial intelligence experts, billionaires, and computer scientists on the planet. It’s the “An Inconvenient Truth” of AI films.

Look. When you sit down in a dark room to watch a documentary, you expect to be entertained and hopefully informed. You do not expect to experience a profound existential crisis about the survival of the human race. The film perfectly captures the absolute whiplash of living in the current year. You spend half the movie marvelling at technological miracles of machine learning, and the other half calculating the odds of global thermonuclear extinction.

“Welp, the shit is out of the horse …and the horse is gonna keep shitting.”

The documentary starts by completely demystifying how these large language models actually function. They digest the entire internet. They consume every single thing ever made by a human being, all of Wikipedia, every Reddit thread (oof), and every social media post (double-oof). The developers give the system one singular job: figure out the patterns of that information and use them to predict the next word in a sentence.

Sounds fairly straightforward, right? Keep reading below..

And look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads

Share

It’s a bit of a solemn one today, folks. I’ll get back to being a complete goofball tomorrow, I promise.

This weekend is ANZAC Day -Australia’s version of Memorial Day. In honour of that, I’m re-publishing something I wrote last year on the topic. Reading it back, it struck me how little I realised we were about to plunge into— we’ve since witnessed military conflicts in South America, all over the Middle East, and beyond. The world is no longer at peace, and who knows where it’ll be one year from now.

Anyway. Here’s my piece.
Hope you enjoy it.

Every year on April 25th, I wake up around 4:30am, while it’s still cold outside.

I put on a suit and tie. I unlock my safe and take out my grandfather's medals, and clumsily pin them to my lapel in the dark. I put on the cheap old watch he gave me, then I leave my Hell’s Kitchen apartment to wander West to join the small contingent of fellow expat Aussies, New Zealanders and Turks at the foot of the USS Intrepid.

There, we partake in an annual ritual that most New Yorkers have no idea is happening while they sleep: We're celebrating ANZAC Day -a solemn commemoration that Americans might recognise as similar to their Memorial Day, though with its own distinct history and traditions.

The Hudson River wind is reliably brutal at that hour; a knife-edge chill that cuts through even the heaviest wool suit. We used to do this at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial downtown on Water Street, but post-pandemic, this has been the spot. Over the years, we've endured torrential rain, hail, and windstorms that threatened to send the smaller dignitaries airborne. Yet we always show up. We always commemorate.

The New York ceremony typically involves a priest, as well as various Australian diplomats and politicians. Representatives from the Turkish consulate also attend—a testament to how former enemies can become friends. American service members stand alongside us, a reminder of the military alliance that has seen Australian forces join the United States in virtually every major conflict since World War I.

ANZAC stands for Australian & New Zealand Army Corps, and April 25th marks the anniversary of the 1915 Gallipoli campaign—a devastating World War I battle where Australian and New Zealand forces suffered catastrophic casualties while attempting to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey. The campaign became a defining moment for both young nations, cementing their identities separate from Britain despite fighting under its flag.

Most Americans are unaware that Australia and the United States have long shared a special bond, codified in the ANZUS Treaty of 1951. If it weren't for the US, Australia would be a very different country today. American forces helped defend Australia from the threat of Japanese invasion during World War II when it was most vulnerable.

When the ceremony ends with the haunting notes of the Last Post—the bugler positioned just so, with the massive silhouette of the Intrepid looming above—I think of my grandfather (“Poppy”). I was very lucky I got to spend so much time with him growing up. When I still lived in my hometown, my sister or I used to march in the parade alongside him and the remaining survivors of his battalion. My whole family would turn out to cheer them on from the sidelines.

Harry was just a kid from a small gold mining town called Kalgoorlie in Western Australia when he was enlisted. Right before he died, after 7 decades of silence, we sat in his quiet room at the nursing home in Perth, and he proceeded to tell me what he saw when he was deployed. It was a harrowing thing for a young 20-something kid from the bush to see. It rattled me. It rattled him. It changed his entire perspective on the world forever when he returned from the war, married my grandmother, and started a family. I wrote down everything he told me and fact-checked it against mission reports and declassified Australian Government reports from World War 2.

I think it’s important that I know it, regardless of how dark and unsettling it all is. I’ll never forget what he and his friends did to keep our country free from fascism. From totalitarian rulers with no regard for the human misery they spread with their poisonous ideas.

Looking up at the Australian and New Zealand flags fluttering next to the American stars and stripes, I feel the weight of my newly minted dual citizenship. I resent that the word ‘patriot’ has been co-opted by the right to mean you’re a flag-waving, AR-15-toting lunatic who storms the Capitol wearing a horned helmet. I’m patriotic about both my countries of citizenship, but I’m not a right-winger.

The relationship between our countries has become increasingly complex in recent years, which saddens me profoundly. Utterly unqualified people like Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth flagrantly disregard the danger he puts the men and women in uniform in by using a personal phone to share confidential military data, and we all just have to stand by and watch through clasped hands, while people make excuses for him. Until he does it again. And again.

It makes me sick to my stomach to see the things that were fought for over the years flagrantly torn down in such short order, and the country’s relationships and global reputation fractured so severely. But on this day, in this pre-dawn ceremony, the connection between our countries remains unbroken—even if it's one that most of Manhattan sleeps through.

Harry was my favourite person.

When he died, he left his service medals to me in his will, and I've never missed an ANZAC Day since. I hope enough people carry on the tradition to keep their memory alive in the minds of the generations who’ve enjoyed the world’s longest unbroken stretch of ‘peacetime’ in human history.

I was sitting with Poppy at lunch in Perth in November 2016 when Trump- the petulant sociopath who blocked me on Twitter- won his first US presidential election. I’d returned home because he was very sick -it would be one of the last times I ever saw him. As we watched on my phone, each state turning red, I told him what was happening back in the US. He shook his head with the exasperated resignation only a 98-year-old war veteran could convey:

"People will never bloody learn."

Share

But if you’ve been reading this newsletter for more than five minutes, you know I am obsessed with the messy, unglamorous back-end of making a living as an artist. I love pulling back the curtain on the artists who look at the “churn,” laugh, and figure out how to keep the lights on without selling their souls to the algorithm.

This week, I’m bringing in a guy who built his own lifeboat:
I am excited to announce that my guest on Draw Me Anything this Thursday is , the founder, publisher, and editor of The American Bystander.

ADD IT TO YOUR CALENDAR NOW!

If you aren’t familiar, The American Bystander is essentially the spiritual successor to legendary publications like National Lampoon, SPY, and Punch. Newsweek literally called it “the last great humour magazine.” Before that, Michael was the mastermind behind the mega-bestselling Barry Trotter parodies and the resurrection of the Yale Record. But here’s the bit that absolutely fascinates me: Michael didn’t go begging to corporate overlords to fund this thing….

We’re going to dive deep into the innovative, super-lean publishing model he now uses at The Bystander. There are no advertisers breathing down their necks and no SEO-driven clickbait. Instead, he built a direct, reader-supported lifeline between world-class comedy writers, cartoonists, and the people who actually want to hold a physical, high-quality humour magazine in their hands. We’re going to talk about why this “slow food” approach to comedy is surviving the deluge of AI slop.

We’re also going to chat about my fellow New Yorker cartoonist Baron Von Schoogenheimer himself, Tom Chitty. A few weeks ago on the show, Tom and I discussed his brilliant new book, The Nooks & Crannies of New York City.

Tom’s book is the first original book published under The Bystander’s new model, so Michael and I will be talking about exactly how that project came to life -and, as always, while Michael and I are dissecting the ruthless mechanics of independent publishing, I will be live-drawing whatever absurd requests you throw at me in the chat.

If you care about the survival of human-made art and the grit it takes to actually publish it right now, you need to be in the chat.

Putting these live streams together, wrestling with glitchy broadcasting software, and trying to convince the internet to pay attention requires a unique cocktail of caffeine and sheer willpower. If you want to join the live stream, request a drawing, and help repay the labour of making this digital monastery run, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for just $1 a week.

Subscribe now

So. Grab a coffee, locate your favourite fineliner, and tune in tomorrow (Thursday) at 2:30pm Eastern time.

‘til then!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

Share

Friday, 11:00 AM – The Masterclass in Not Sucking at Being A Comedian

Location: The Booker’s Workshop

I dragged my throbbing head downstairs for a panel with various comedy club bookers from around the region. I sat at the back of the room with Roger Paul, an agent who used to send me out on the road years ago.

The premise of the panel was simple: a room full of industry professionals telling us idiot comedians what not to do when submitting for gigs, weekends, and one-nighters.

You’d think the advice would be complex, maybe rooted in advanced psychological audience dynamics... It wasn’t. It was staggering how basic it was:

Have a headshot. Show up on time (or, better yet, early). Don’t be a dick to the waitstaff or the booker. Watch the other comics. Hang out after the show and thank the audience so they actually want to come back. The bar for basic professionalism in the comedy industry is so low, it is practically subterranean.

But the most fascinating part of the morning was hearing how the landscape of booking rooms is shifting.

For the last ten to fifteen years, if you had a massive social media following, you could skip the line. It was infuriating for the lifelong road dogs who spent decades honing their craft, only to watch a 22-year-old with a viral TikTok account sell out a room three nights in a row.

But the tide turns... Bookers are then seeing that just because a kid can edit a 30-second crowd-work clip doesn’t mean they can sustain an hour on stage. They sell out the room once, but they never get return audiences because they don’t have the stagecraft, the pacing, or a fully developed voice. Selling a bunch of overpriced drinks and wings is one thing; putting on a professional show so good it gets people back to do it again is another.

The takeaway of the morning was this: Success in comedy isn’t getting booked. It’s getting rebooked. There is such a glut of comedians right now that some clubs are on an 18-month rotation. The algorithm won’t save you. The only thing that will save you is a mailing list and actually being undeniable on stage.

Friday, 4:00 PM – The Yellow Shirt (Golden boy)

Location: The Hotel Theatre

I went back to my room, did some writing, and then headed down to the hotel theatre. In a deft move by the festival organisers, all the comedians were asked to volunteer for a shift this year. It gives everyone a sense of ownership over the weekend.

I was assigned to work front-of-house for an improv murder mystery show. I put on a bright yellow volunteer shirt and helped seat the flood of people coming through the doors. Once the crowd was settled, I grabbed a drink with my fellow volunteer, Mark.

Naturally, we immediately started talking about New York. All of his kids live in the city, and it sounds like they’re going through the exact same existential dread that I am regarding the catastrophic affordability issues. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Northern Michigan; if there are two people with ties to New York in a room, it will only take four minutes before they start kvetching about real estate.

Friday, 8:30 PM – The Roy Wood Jr. Masterclass

Location: The Opera House

I kept my yellow volunteer shirt on, bumped into my new friend Rosey Catherine on the street to talk shop, and then snuck into the back of the Opera House. The lineup was stacked. Derek Richards opened, followed by Johnny Mocny, and then Nthenya Ndunda. All of them crushed. But then, Roy Wood Jr. took the stage.

If the morning workshop was the theory of how to be a great comedian, Roy Wood Jr. was the practical exam.

Read more

Thursday, 6:15 AM – The Locked Door

Location: Hotel Indigo Lobby

I woke up after precisely four hours of sleep with a crick in my neck, a throbbing headache, and the distinct feeling that I’d aged a decade overnight. I dragged my carcass through the shower and down to the hotel lobby to meet Ann, the festival director.

She had just woken up Bob, the marketing director, from a deep, peaceful slumber because -in a classic piece of festival scheduling- both of the local TV stations wanted to interview her at the exact same time. She threw Bob to the wolves at the Fox affiliate, and she and I hightailed it to the other station.

We arrived at the studio with minutes to spare... The door was locked. We stood there in the freezing morning fog, peering through the glass, until a long, heavy silence settled over us. We had gotten the time wrong. Eventually, the TV host wandered out, unlocked the door, and looked at us like we were crazy. “You guys are really early,” he said. “The show doesn’t start till 9:00. You aren’t on until 9:30…”

Defeated and bleary-eyed, we retreated to the hotel for coffee and breakfast to do the thing comics do best: talk shop and crack wise.

Thursday, 9:30 AM – The Garbled Brainfart

Location: The Local Affiliate

We returned to the station just in time to go live on the air. I sat under the studio lights, squinting into the camera, trying to drum up a cogent sentence about the festival, and comedy in general.

I have absolutely no memory of what I said. It was a garbled, sleep-deprived mess. The anchor’s questions were so spectacularly vague that forming a complete, grammatically correct sentence felt like defusing a bomb. I just smiled, fumbled my way through some syllables that vaguely resembled English, and prayed the viewers were as tired as I was before they brought on the coach for the local Curling team.

If you enjoy my work and would like to support, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

Thursday, 12:00 PM – The View

Location: Hotel Indigo

I attempted a nap. It failed. I tried to write. It was useless. Eventually, Devin Keast -the man, the myth, the legend- knocked on my door to show me the incredible view of the bay from the other side of the hotel.

I, of course, do not have a view of the bay. My window looks directly out onto a brick wall. But honestly? It’s deeply comforting. After being overwhelmed by all the fresh air and open sky yesterday, waking up to a solid wall of masonry makes me feel right at home. I’m a New Yorker; give me a brick wall over a horizon any day.

Thursday, 6:00 PM – The Slabs & the Utes

Location: Right Brain Brewing

Devin dropped me off at Right Brain Brewing, where I was slated to host a show, before racing off to his own gig at the comedy club. The brewery is gigantic. I constantly forget how much physical space the rest of America has. I walked through the doors, past a sprawling ceiling and various doors covered in stickers, and into a massive barrel room. The smell of the hops and the old wood immediately transported me back to my childhood, doing stocktake with my cousin Gavin in the bottle shop of my dad’s pub.

We used to spend our afternoons watching tradies rumble through the drive-through, piling slabs of beer into the trays of their utes after a long day on the construction site. Gavin and I used to give them all nicknames based entirely on their faces and their drink orders. I hadn’t thought about those guys in years, but standing in this brewery, their names came rushing back: No-Neck Nev, Four-X Phil, Sweaty Pete. What a time to be alive.

Thursday, 7:45 PM – The Jason Sandwich

Location: Right Brain Brewing Stage

I checked in with Greg, a comic who usually performs at the festival but is volunteering to run the shows this year. He and the bar manager were deep in logistical negotiations, trying to figure out how to get the audience completely drunk without interrupting the comedy. They settled on a paper-slip system where people could write their orders down and clip them to the table.

Brilliant in theory, except it required everyone to open a tab before the show. The line for the bar snaked all the way out the front door.

We started late. We couldn’t figure out how to dim the house lights, and we couldn’t figure out how to turn down the venue music. So, I just jumped on stage and hoped for the best.

The lack of nerves was a red flag, but the Midwest audience was a dream. They are generous. They smile. They clap. They respond when spoken to, but they don’t heckle. They don’t try to make themselves the main character. They don’t have TikTok-brain, demanding crowdwork every 3 seconds. They actually respect that we sat down, wrote material, practised it, and are now performing it for them. God forbid.

I tested out some local material Devin had fed me while we drove around town. I asked the crowd about Vernors- the local ginger ale that Michiganders treat as a mystical, medicinal cure-all. Everyone in the room knew exactly what I was talking about. Outside of this state, it doesn’t exist, but here, it’s penicillin in a green can. I also asked if the Flapjack Shack over on US-31 was an actual restaurant or just a front for a meth lab. The entire room nodded in solemn agreement. Meth lab.

The lineup was incredible. Janelle Draper -an old friend I haven’t seen since before the pandemic- absolutely crushed it. She recently moved back to NYC from L.A. after opening for Jay Leno, and she is sharper than ever. I opened the show, and Jason Jameson closed it, making the entire evening a perfectly executed Jason Sandwich. (That doesn’t sound great now that I’m seeing it written out.)

These are the comics that appeared on the show - all hilarious, all worth a follow:
• @brownryancomedy • @renqcomedy • @janellejokes • @darrickervinii • @thejasonxperience • @im_nthenya • @lisarimmy • @pattyrooney

Thursday, 9:00 PM – Decorative Sidewalks

Location: The Streets of Traverse City

After the show, I needed to move. I hadn’t taken more than twenty steps all day, so I started walking toward the Opera House. A navy blue Mercedes SUV pulled up alongside me, and the window rolled down to reveal a smiling woman in her sixties. “Thank you so much!” she yelled. “Your show was so funny, we had a great time!”

I thanked her. She looked at me, confused. “Do you need a lift somewhere? Why are you walking?”

It was in that exact moment I realized that in Manhattan, walking is transportation. Here, the sidewalks are purely decorative. There wasn’t a single soul on the concrete for miles in any direction. I politely declined, explaining I needed to stretch my legs. She looked at me like I was insane, rolled up her window, and drove away.

Thursday, 9:05 PM – Touching Dog Hair

Location: Traverse City Whiskey Co.

Still walking, I glanced through the window of an unassuming building on the corner and saw lights and bottles stacked high against a brick wall. It was the Traverse City Whiskey Co.

I walked in and was immediately greeted by “Roo,” an Australian Shepherd with one brown eye and one blue eye. I spotted him, he spotted me, and we both knew exactly what was about to happen. I sat down and patted him for ten straight minutes. It completely reset my nervous system. It was the comic’s equivalent of “touching grass,” but with dog hair.

I ordered a local whiskey, talked to a few locals, bullied them into buying the last remaining tickets for the weekend, and headed out.

Friday, 11:20 PM – The Comedy Camp

Location: Hotel Indigo Bar

The Opera House was locked, so I headed back to the hotel. It had transformed into a full-blown welcome party.

Comics, bookers, agents, managers, and festival staff were packed into the lobby. This is the real reason we do these festivals. It’s Comedy Camp. We are all afflicted with the same brain derangement, which means we get to skip the polite formalities of normal human interaction. Within ten seconds of meeting a stranger, you are already trading war stories, hell-gig survival tactics, and social media strategies.

I bumped into Roger Paul, a booker who used to send me out on the road years ago. His assistant, Johnny, is now a dear friend of mine and a brilliant New Yorker cartoonist. When Johnny was booking my road gigs back in the day, I had no idea he was sitting on that kind of talent. Roger told me he has Johnny’s top three cartoons framed on his office wall.

As the night wore on, the laughs got louder, the stories got darker, and someone -I still don’t know who- snuck in a few tiny bottles of something truly disgusting for us to do shots of. I am going to pay for this tomorrow with a throbbing headache and crippling reflux. But right now, surrounded by people who willingly chose this ridiculous life, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Bring on Day Three.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

Share

For the next three nights, I’m performing several shows as a guest of the Traverse City Comedy Festival in Michigan. (If Michigan doesn’t get washed away in a flash flood...) I’ll share my daily diary of the festival’s goings-on with you as they unfold unravel.

~ Jason

Wednesday, 8:15 AM – The Guilt Trip

Location: Manhattan & Queens, NY

Packing a suitcase on the morning of a flight is a rookie mistake, but I am a professional at making my own life difficult. As I cram crinkled shirts into a broken suitcase, Morris watches me with his beady little eyes. I can see the deep, burning resentment in his face. He knows I’m leaving him. What he doesn’t know is that he is about to get the greatest walk of his life from his Uncle Paulie, the undisputed king of New York dog walkers. Still, the guilt is heavy.

I scoot my bag along the sidewalk to the subway, and the MTA, sensing my urgency, immediately collapses. The trains are running on different lines. I make it to the end of the E in Queens only to find that buses no longer exist. I eventually flag down one of those neon green outer-borough taxis. He charges me an arm and a leg (plus tax) to drive me the final 50 meters to LaGuardia.

Wednesday, 1:30 PM – The Eaves-drawing

Location: LaGuardia Airport, NY

The TSA line is a slow-moving river of angry, exhausted humanity. Despite being fully funded by the Department of Homeland Security, the system is backed up to the curb. I shuffle past an airport massage parlour called “Be Relax,” which sounds exactly like a business named by Melania.

All the afternoon flights have banked up. We are delayed. I retreat to the airport bar, pull out my sketchbook, and begin “Eavesdrawing”—listening to people’s inane conversations and sketching them.

• Subject A & B: Two girls heading to a bachelorette party in Chicago.

• Subject C: A guy at the end of the bar, trying desperately to pick them up, completely ignoring the fact that they have name-dropped their boyfriends into the conversation no less than fourteen times.

• Subject D: A woman next to me on her way to visit her grandkids in Arizona. She leans over and asks if I’d like to finish the rest of her Prosecco because they’re calling her flight. I know she’s just trying to be nice and not waste a drink, but absolutely not. It’s Champagne or nothing. (What, does she think I’m an animal?)

Oh yeah..

At this point, I should probably mention that I’ve been invited to perform at the Traverse City Comedy Festival. It’s absolutely crazy to be on lineups with people like Gary Goldman, Roy Wood Jr., Megan Stalter, Sarah Sherman, Joe DeVito, and so a heap of other great comedians from around America.

It’s a truly fantastic festival, and they really take care of you. You can see and hear me talking to the festival director, Anne, on a previous episode of Draw Me Anything from last week; you can catch that here:

Wednesday, 3:45 PM – The Devil Wears Prada

Location: Somewhere over Pennsylvania?

I board the flight dead last. I am jammed into a middle seat between a lanky teenager who hasn’t showered in fifteen weeks and an obese, hirsute man who insists on watching The Devil Wears Prada on his phone without AirPods.

I try to get some work done, but focus is impossible. I spend the flight doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, punctuated by tinny, aggressive blasts of Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt trading sassy jabs at Anne Hathaway from my seatmate’s phone speaker.

If you enjoy my work and would like to support a human artist, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber (only $1 per week)

Wednesday, 5:30 PM – Independence Sauce

Location: O’Hare Airport, Chicago

O’Hare is absolute bedlam. Flights are delayed, cancelled, or missing entirely. People are propping themselves up against pillars and garbage cans just to keep from falling over amid the bedlam.

I squeeze into a bar between an old man who looks like he’s been sitting there since the Reagan administration and a woman from Kansas City who tells me she lives in an RV. She is seated next to the only other Australian in the entire airport. His name is Bruce. Because of course it is. And he knows exactly who Ginger Meggs is, because he is over fifty-five years old.

Bruce and I speak for twenty minutes in an impenetrable Australian shorthand while the RV woman stares at us as if we’ve just arrived from Uranus. I order a side of tater tots. Forty seconds later, a trough of potatoes and grease is slammed in front of me, accompanied by a ramekin of “Independence Sauce.” I don’t want to know what makes the sauce independent. I eat three tots just to justify my barstool, knowing full well I will regret it if my connecting flight ever actually takes off.

Wednesday, 8:15 PM – The Lolly-Stick Express

Location: The Tarmac

Michigan is currently experiencing a biblical flash flood, which explains the delays. We finally board the puddle-jumper to Traverse City. Once again, I am the last one on.

I am squeezed into a tin can that feels like the wings were attached with sticky tape, and the fuselage is made of lolly sticks. As we bounce through the turbulence and fog, I genuinely spend five minutes trying to remember if I ever got around to drafting a will.

Wednesday, 10:30 PM – The Irish Exit

Location: Traverse City, Michigan

We “land” with a heavy thud. There is a deeply passive-aggressive sign near baggage claim reminding me to have patience. After a wait that spans the length of an entire Trump administration, my bag finally spits out onto the carousel. I step out into the freezing Michigan air just as my old friend Devin Keast pulls up. Perfect comedic timing.

Devin and I used to run a weekly open mic in New York that eventually morphed into a wildly popular show, and later, a podcast called Move On Up.

I am ravenous. Every kitchen in town is closed except for one place called The Parlor. We sit at the bar. I order a Negroni. Devon orders a red wine. The bartender is a girl on her third night of work, and she looks completely terrified. She has no idea if they serve wine. In fact, she doesn’t seem to know if she’s even in Michigan. She takes our drink order, walks into the back room, and never returns.

We assume she quit, left through the alley, and perhaps set fire to the building next door (a theory we confirmed when we saw the local news the next morning). Another bartender eventually wanders in off the street and replaces her. We talk about the NYC grind, the Bronx gig we did last weekend, and share quotes from Sam Tallent’s brilliant, dark road-comic novel, Running the Light.

Devin tells me Traverse City is proudly the “Cherry Capital.” I immediately picture a billboard on the highway that just says: Welcome to Traverse City: Population 15,000. Fuck Cranberries. A lone musician in the corner starts playing desperately sad, gravelly Damien Rice covers on his guitar. It is our cue to leave.

Or Dance. We can never tell.

Before hitting the hotel, Devin and I had stopped at a local supermarket the size of Manhattan to stock up on essentials: wine and an irresponsible amount of Pedialyte. We also drove past the local comedy club, which features a gargantuan rat mascot out front. Maybe it’s just the New Yorker in me, but I flinched.

Thursday, 12:15 AM – The Vegan Taco Bell

Location: Hotel Indigo, Traverse City, MI

We walk into the hotel lobby to find a befuddled delivery guy wandering aimlessly with a cold bag of Taco Bell. He looks at us. “Are you Sarah?” “No,” we tell him. “We are not Sarah- collectively, nor is either of us individually Sarah.”

Right on cue, the elevator doors slide open. Saturday Night Live‘s Sarah Sherman shuffles out in incredibly loud pants. “I’m… Sarah,” she says sheepishly. “That vegan Taco Bell burrito is for me.”

It turns out the comedian goodie bags provided by the festival contained a THC lemon-lime drink called Buzzn. Sarah, who doesn’t normally smoke weed, didn’t realise how hard it hit. She accidentally got extraordinarily high and needed a burrito to survive the night. We stand in the lobby talking in that weird, disjointed shorthand comedians use.

I am exhausted, mildly dehydrated, and have to be awake in five hours to do morning television with the festival director, Ann. But looking at the lineup this weekend, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Let the festival begin.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.

Share

Journal Entry:
November 2, 2017
Hasbrouck Heights, NJ

A man in a tailored red suit and a backpack sits across from me on the subway, aggressively reading a tattered paperback of Dune. He looks exactly like the mysterious G-Man from Half-Life, wandering ominously through the simulation before completely vanishing.

I check my cracked phone screen between stations. An email from my agent waits for me. I am booked to host four shows this weekend at Bananas Comedy Club. It sounds glamorous until you realise it is just a converted conference room inside a Holiday Inn Express on the side of a busy New Jersey highway.

I am forced to navigate the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It possesses a formidable perfume. It is a hot fuselage of passenger poo wafting through the air. You get notes of week-old urine, cheap cigars, and the slightest soupçon of wet dog. I am the last to board the bus. I squeeze snugly between a hirsute gentleman in a tank top and a septuagenarian with a weaponised case of halitosis. Every single person on this vehicle looks like they are two stops away from snapping like Edward Norton in Fight Club. Myself included.

A highway crash adds an hour to the trip. Everyone apparently harbours a severe nasal infection. The cabin becomes a dense symphony of sneezes and snorts. We finally pull onto Main Street. The pneumatic doors hiss open in front of a statue of a small boy glaring creepily at a man in a uniform. I am officially in New Jersey.