Here is the CV, and I have since checked it against his actual bio rather than my memory, which is a courtesy I extend to guests and to no one else. Five years at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, first as web producer and then as staff writer, where he collected four Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards and three WGA Awards. Head writer and executive producer on Desus & Mero at Showtime. A contributor to the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Two stand-up specials: People Pleaser (2022) and Positive Reinforcement (2025). A book of essays, Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results. Co-creator of the parody Twitter account @SeinfeldToday. A regular panellist on NPR’s Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!

We first met about ten years ago at Union Hall, doing Picture This, the show where cartoonists draw live while comedians perform and everyone pretends this is a normal way to spend an evening. I have two deeply unemployable skills: cartoonist and comedian. My parents are thrilled. Picture This is the only place on earth where both of them are load-bearing at once.

Josh’s read on it was better than mine:

“You’re watching something that’s never happened before and will never happen again. Everybody is kind of on edge seeing how the artists will interpret the comedy and how the comedians will react to the art. It’s perfect.”

We also remembered a show where the comic on stage was working a long stretch about diarrhoea, and I, being a professional, had no choice but to render it. Gratuitously. Backstage was a convivial disgrace. We were crying.

That’s the whole show, really. Backstage is better than the stage. (Don’t tell the box office.)

The Overnight Success That Took 9 Years

I confessed that I had followed @SeinfeldToday for years without ever once registering that Josh was behind it. He co-created it with Jack Moore in late 2012: log lines for Seinfeld episodes, were they to exist in the present day, and present day was 2012 into 2013… which is now a period piece.

The numbers are fucking absurd:

“By, I would say, 48 hours later, it had like 100,000 followers... Never had anything like that happen to me before or since. It was like as close as I had to being Hawk Tuah.”

The Sunday night the account was formed, Josh had dinner with a friend who worked as a manager. She told him, gently, that she loved working with him and would keep helping him out, but that her boss was after clients with a slightly higher profile.

Two days later, the boss wanted a meeting. And to sign him!

“I’ve never seen something turn on a dime like that in my life before.”

He had samples. He’d been doing stand-up for years. But he didn’t have the bulletproof script sitting in a drawer waiting for the world to finally notice him. He had drafts that were “all kind of a little rough.” So the lightning struck, and he spent the next year converting it into late-night writing applications, one at a time, like a man turning a lottery win into a mortgage.

The heat arrives whether or not you’re ready. It doesn’t wait while you tidy up.

The Taste of a 57-Year-Old Father of Three

Nice Try is a collection of essays, and I have described it, to Josh’s face and now to you, as being like “A Kind David Sedaris.” He took the compliment the way he takes everything, which is to say he immediately turned it into an admission of ongoing inadequacy:

“We moved into a new apartment last week and I was just shelving my books and I saw my old copies of Naked... I haven’t looked at it in years, but it was like, I’m chasing that still as a prose writer.”

Same. The personal essay has a king, and we are both loitering outside the palace.

There’s a bit in the book about a childhood library trip and discovering R.L. Stine, and a line about having the taste of a 57-year-old father of three.

“Books were kind of the place where I could have more adult taste. My parents were a little more protective with movies and TV and even violent video games. But with books, it was kind of whatever I could get my hands on.”

Which is how a child ends up with real, considered positions on prime John Grisham. The Rainmaker. The Client. The Firm. He said “prime Grisham” the way other men say “prime Coltrane.” That truly is 57-year-old-father-of-three behaviour.

Writing in Someone Else’s Mouth

Here’s the thing about Josh’s writing that I’ve never been able to get past. Him on stage is him on the page. The voice is identical, and it’s completely unique, and yet he spent five years writing in an acerbic British one, and got four Emmys for it.

How?

Below: how you make an atrocity funny without becoming a ghoul, the word Gary Gulman put in my head that I can’t get out, the pumpkin quiche incident, and why the meanest guy in the room in 2007 was never the one to copy.

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Welcome back for another episode of Is There Something In This? Dools and Chatto are back in the writer’s room, slinging zingers, avoiding Obvious Ocean Liners and vying for the Outback Steakhouse Pick-of-the-Week®!

This week, we’re trying something a bit new by recording our video of the show. Let us know in the comments if you like it, and we’ll keep doing it… probably.

By the way if you want to binge all of our previous episodes in an endless playlist like it’s some kind of Netflix Drama that just got nominated for an Emmy®, You can find our entire backlog right here.

Send us your cartoon idea suggestions! We can’t guarantee we will read every one on the show, but we will read all messages we get here.

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▶ Be sure to send in your suggestions via Instagram @newyorkcartoons or yourenotarealemail@gmail.com. Cheers!

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If you’re new here…

Hi. We have a podcast called Is There Something In This?, where we sit down with a beer and try to build a New Yorker cartoon out of nothing but two Australian accents and a shared refusal to be defeated by a joke idea.

We hadn’t recorded in a while. How long is hard to say precisely, but Scott put a pin in it for us: the last time we potted, the Knicks hadn’t won anything, there had never been hand-to-hand combat on the White House lawn, and Charlie Kirk was alive.

So. Bit of a gap.

What the show actually is

If you’ve never listened, the premise is embarrassingly simple: Every week we bring in half-formed ideas, and we hold them up to the light together until they either become a cartoon or die of shame. Some become dailies for the New Yorker’s site and socials. Some go into the magazine. Most of them go nowhere, and you get to watch that happen, which is the best part.

The whole exercise is right there in the name. Somebody says a thing. The other one says: Is there something in this? And then we find out, live, with no editing and no dignity.

We got about ninety seconds in before I derailed us with a story about the comedian Gary Gulman, backstage, being told the costumes were designed by a man named Beowulf Borrit. Scott’s contention is that with a name like Beowulf you have exactly two career options: Broadway costume designer, or vampire.

Which led us to the image of young Beowulf brushing his teeth in the mirror while someone gently breaks the news. Hey, buddy. You can see yourself.

It’s like a fighter pilot learning he’s colourblind.

The Knicks cartoon

The cartoon we got up was the Knicks seating plan, because the tickets were eye-wateringly expensive. World Cup fans looked at those prices and said no thank you. The sections were the usual suspects: celebrities, your boss’s boss’s boss, tech and finance bros, and then, in the cheap seats of the soul, real fans who are terrible with money.

A mate texted Scott the same night: Yo, I feel pretty called out, I’m going tonight. He spent a fortune and watched them lose because Trump was in attendance.

We also got fact-checked by Ronny Chieng, who suggested we add crypto. I said crypto lives inside tech and finance bros. It was two in the afternoon.

I officiated a Titanic-themed wedding

This is real. I am ordained in the state of New York, which means going downtown to City Hall to register with the county clerk, where they marry someone roughly every five seconds and you can always spot the second wedding by the white two-piece tracksuit.

The clerk handed me my paperwork and said, congratulations, sir.

I said, oh, I’m not getting married, I’m officiating.

She said, oh, I’m sorry.

I said, no, no, I’m divorced.

We’re now having an entire conversation. I explain that I’ve just filed my divorce papers and I’m about to officiate a wedding. She says: that’s bad luck.

I said: you think that’s bad luck? The theme is “Titanic!”

They are getting married on the door. They have recreated the door. I am dressed as the captain, which Scott correctly pointed out is a man famous for steering directly into a disaster, and if that’s the metaphor for the marriage, well.

Also worth noting, for anyone whose art is stuck: go and sit in City Hall and watch the weddings come in and out. The parents, the divorcees, all in the same building. It is the richest room in the city. I sketched the clerk at the desk and gave it to her, and she went from I hate my goddamn job to oh my God, holy shit! in about a second. Scott said he could never do that, because he can’t draw, so his version would be walking up and saying “Hey, look at these photos I took of you while you weren’t watching.”

Send us your rubbish ideas

Genuinely. If you’re watching on Substack, drop your seedlings in the comments. We had precisely zero listener suggestions this week, on account of the eight-year gap, which is nobody’s fault but ours.

We might scribble it up, mention you on the pod, and if it’s good enough, submit it with your name on it. We’re not paying you. Nobody’s paying anybody. This is the arts.

‘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.

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Tuesday, July 14th 2026
New York, NY

There’s a photograph on my hard drive of a group of cartoonists crowded into a hotel room 20 years ago, all of us grinning like we’d won something.

We had, in a way. The Australian Cartoonists’ Association had flown Pat Oliphant and his wife Susan out as guests of honour for the Stanley Awards, which is our version of the Reubens, and a handful of us had been quietly ushered up by the President to meet him.

I didn’t notice until later, looking at the photo, that at the exact moment I pressed the shutter, the most decorated political cartoonist in the history of the form had calmly flipped the bird.

No announcement. No wink. Just a 74-year-old master craftsman deploying a middle finger with the same precision he’d aimed at every American president since Lyndon Johnson. It was the most Pat Oliphant thing imaginable: sneaky, perfectly timed, and funnier than anything else in the room.

Pat died on Sunday, aged 90. And I want to make a claim I’ve been bloviating about at dinner parties for years, usually to people with no way of checking: Pat Oliphant is the most influential Australian ever to emigrate to the United States.

I know. Rupert Murdoch also exists. But influence has a sign in front of it, positive or negative, and I’d rather not get sued in two hemispheres, so let’s move on.

From Adelaide to everywhere

The facts of the career, courtesy of the ACA’s tribute this week, read like something a Hollywood executive would reject as too tidy. Born in Adelaide in 1935. A cadetship in the art department of The Advertiser. Then, in 1964, a vacancy at The Denver Post, which he grabbed at the urging of a fellow Australian cartoonist named Paul Rigby.

Within a year of landing in America, the Los Angeles Times was syndicating him nationally. Within three, he’d won the Pulitzer. By 1980 he’d joined Universal Press Syndicate and become the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in America, running in more than 500 newspapers -enough leverage that no editor could tell him what to think, which suited him, because no editor ever successfully had.

Here’s my favourite measure of his influence, better than the Pulitzer, better than the seven NCS Editorial Cartoon Awards, better than the two Reubens or the Thomas Nast Prize: at one point Pat started using DuoShade board, a chemically treated paper that produced textured grey backgrounds. Nearly every political cartoonist in America immediately did the same. When he dropped it in the early 80s, the company’s sales collapsed.

That is influence. Not applause. Not likes. An entire industry buying the paper you buy, then abandoning it the moment you do, like starlings.

Perth, a drawing desk, and a stack of photocopies

When I was 17, at my very first drawing desk in Perth, I sat with a pile of Oliphant cartoons and tried to reverse-engineer them the way other teenage mechanics apprentices took apart car engines. How did he compose a panel? Where did he put the solid blacks? Why did that one patch of untouched white paper feel louder than everything around it?

I never fully cracked it. Nobody has. But the exercise taught me more than any art school could have, because an Oliphant cartoon was an ecosystem: remove one element and the whole thing collapsed. He knew exactly what to draw, and more importantly, he knew exactly what not to. He never cross-hatched to fill space. Everything on the page was there on purpose.

He was, and I will not be taking questions, the finest draftsman who ever worked in this game. Alongside names like Thomas Nast, he sits in the very small club of cartoonists who changed what the job was. Fittingly, in 1992 they gave him the prize named after Nast. If you weren’t trying to copy what Pat was doing, you weren’t serious about your job. Most of us were trying. None of us were succeeding.

“Pat Oliphant lives on the trunk of the tree. Remove him, and you don’t get a different tree. You get a stump.”

~ Nick Galifianakis

And there was the Perth connection. Paul Rigby, the same West Australian who’d talked Pat into taking the Denver job in 1964, wrote to Pat on my behalf in 2006, when I was 21, asking him to look after me if I made it to Washington DC. The timing never worked out. So when I finally shook Pat’s hand in that Sydney hotel room three years later -the same trip on which he was inducted into the Australian Cartoonists’ Hall of Fame- it felt like a forty-year-old favour being quietly passed down a generation. They say ‘never meet your heroes’, but with cartoonists that always turns out to be absolute bullshit.

What the others have said (better than I ever could)

, the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist who resigned from the Washington Post rather than soften her pen, published a lovely tribute to Pat this week. She describes meeting him as a young cartoonist at a DC gallery signing in the early 90s, working up the courage to introduce herself, and having her fiancé mention that she was an editorial cartoonist too. Pat looked at her sternly and growled: “You do know it’s a dying art, don’t you?”

Open Windows- Ann Telnaes

Legendary editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant

People will throw around the label of legend in the editorial cartooning profession but Pat Oliphant was truly one. Not only did his editorial cartoons and caricatures slice right through deserving politicians and public figures, his draftsmanship was on a level far above everyone else. No one came close to his drawing ability in editorial cartooning…

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6 days ago · 877 likes · 43 comments · Ann Telnaes

So much for encouraging the youth. (She also notes, correctly, that nobody in the profession came close to his drawing ability, and that Susan Conway -the Washington gallery owner who became his wife and made it her life’s work to see Pat properly credited- was the reason the world knew it. Susan died in December, just seven months before him. I hope wherever they are now has good paper.) Read Ann’s full piece above.

And in 2023, my friend Nick Galifianakis stood up at the Reuben Awards in front of the National Cartoonists Society and delivered the best summary of Pat’s importance I’ve ever heard. I had a small hand in helping Nick put the tribute together, which mostly involved staying out of his way. His argument went like this: he likes Taylor Swift, but if you removed her from the history of pop music, nothing downstream changes. Remove the Beatles, and everything after them changes. “Taylor Swift is a lovely limb on the musical tree of pop music. The Beatles are on the trunk of the tree.”

Pat Oliphant, Nick said, lives on the trunk of the tree. Remove him, and you don’t get a different tree. You get a stump.

He also said something that has rattled around my skull ever since: Pat “drew and wrote for an audience of exactly one person: himself.”

He wasn’t chasing likes. He wasn’t preaching to a choir. He hit everybody, all sides, all ideologies, and he hit hard, which is why the people who hated him read him even more religiously than the people who loved him. Watch Nick’s full speech above.

Pat formally retired in 2015, though the arrival of the Trump presidency briefly un-retired him and his little penguin in 2017; some subjects are simply too well-suited to the instrument. It was the shortest comeback tour in history and, pound for pound, one of the sharpest.

The blotting paper

The last time I was in a room built around Pat’s work was in 2023, at the Century Association in New York, where he and Susan had kindly invited me to a tribute exhibition of his sculptures, sketches and cartoons. Pat’s eyesight had failed, and he could no longer travel, so a gaggle of us -Jeff Danziger, Signe Wilkinson, the inimitable Edward Sorel, a table groaning with Pulitzers- recorded a video message to him instead, a room full of sharp-tongued professionals suddenly gone soft. We all scribbled a little note to be sent back to him. I sketched one of his busts along with his quippy penguin, and sheepishly slid it under my napkin before the giants could catch sight of it.

The gallery held bronzes that could have gone straight into a museum’s permanent collection, and caricatures so incisive they should have required a licence. But the piece that stopped me cold was none of those.

It was his blotting paper.

The big sheet on his drawing desk where he’d test a nib or drag a brush before committing a line to the actual cartoon. Decades of warm-up strokes, half-thoughts, tiny studies, noodlings. Nobody was ever meant to look at it, and it was one of the most extraordinary pieces of art in the building: the mind of a genius with the hand of a master, caught with its guard down. A da Vinci codex made entirely of throat-clearing.

I’ve thought about that sheet a lot since.

We spend our careers trying to make the finished thing look effortless, and here was proof that for Pat, even the effort was beautiful.

Nick closed his Reubens speech by telling the young cartoonists in the room to push their talent, be authentic, and make something beautiful, so as to honour “a time when giants roamed the earth.”

The last giant put his pen down on Sunday. He is survived by three children, two stepchildren, four grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and every working political cartoonist on earth, whether they know it or not.

The rest of us go back to our drawing desks, look at our own scratch paper, and try to earn our keep.

Vale, Pat. Thanks for the finger.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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ADD IT TO YOUR CALENDAR NOW!

I’ve booked a bunch of comedians on Draw Me Anything.

Most of them arrive with a chip on their shoulder, a grudge against an open mic host in 2011, or a haunted look that says I haven’t slept since bombing at my Cellar audition. arrives with the aura of a man who once returned a wallet he found on the subway and then felt guilty for expecting thanks.

Tomorrow week he’s my guest, and I could not be more pleased about it.

Here’s the CV, and it’s a silly one….

Josh spent five years at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, where he collected four Emmys, two Peabodys, and three WGA Awards, which is more hardware than most people accumulate in a lifetime of trying. He then became head writer and executive producer of Desus & Mero. He wrote for the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a thrill he has confirmed was shared by his parents. He has two standup specials, People Pleaser and the brand-new Positive Reinforcement, the titles of which tell you roughly everything about the man.

You’ve heard him on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me. You’ve possibly read Nice Try, his essay collection. And if you were online during a certain golden-rot era of Twitter, you knew him as the co-creator of Modern Seinfeld, an account that imagined what Jerry and the gang would do about texting, which was funnier than it had any right to be.

He also runs a newsletter here on Substack (and elsewhere) called That’s Marvelous!, which sends out weekly pep talks for “readers, strangers, and inanimate objects.” I want you to sit with that last category for a moment. This is a man kind enough to encourage furniture.

I first met Josh doing the show I co-produce at Union Hall called Picture This! - I was drawing for him about 11 years ago when we were both shiny baby boys… I burst into tears laughing mid-set and couldn’t control my drawing hand. He’s pretty fantastic at that.

Which brings me to the reason I actually wanted him on the show.

Comedy, as an industry, mostly rewards the sharpened blade. The quickest, the cruellest, the one who gets there first. Josh has built an entire career on the radical proposition that you can be devastatingly funny and also, somehow, a genuinely decent human being. In a business full of people performing kindness, he appears to have simply gone ahead and been kind, which is far more subversive and much harder to fake.

So tomorrow, I’ll hand him the microphone and the metaphorical pen, and we’ll talk about writing jokes for other people’s mouths, surviving five years of turning the week’s horrors into television, and whether niceness is a strategy or just a personality defect he’s learned to monetise.

Bring your questions. Bring your drawings. Bring the wallet you’ve been meaning to return.

‘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.

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This afternoon I ate vegan quiche with Gary Gulman and Myq Kaplan while the three of us pulled jokes apart the way other men pull apart carburettors: reverently, greasy to the elbows, with no real intention of putting anything back the way we found it.

Why does this word land and that one doesn’t. Whether the laugh lives in the syllable or the silence after it. The sort of conversation that would bore a normal person into the grave and kept me pinned to my chair for two hours.

It was, I realised somewhere between the pumpkin quiche and the third tangent about rhythm, the perfect way to mark the date.

Because nineteen years ago today, I did stand-up comedy for the first time.

It was 2007, at the Hyde Park Hotel in Perth, in a room called Werzel’s Comedy Lounge. I was doing 5 minutes in front of a comedy duo called Luke & Wyatt (the latter would years later become my roommate).

I did jokes about muppets. I did a Ray Romano impression. In Perth. In 2007. To a room of people who had come out on a weeknight to drink beer and were now watching a nervous local pretend to be a sitcom dad from Queens.

I got one laugh.

One. A single, audible laugh, from somewhere in the dark, and I have spent the nineteen years since trying to find that person again. Everything else about the set was a catastrophe. I bombed the way only a first-timer can bomb: thoroughly, sincerely, in a blazer. Any sensible person would have taken the hint, hung up the blazer and gone back to a quiet life.

Instead, I got the bug. That one laugh went into my bloodstream like a splinter, and I have not stopped chasing it since. Nineteen years of open mics, bar shows, clubs, theatres, festivals, green rooms, late trains, and standing in the dark waiting for strangers to decide whether I get to feel good about myself tonight.

But that’s only half of what today is.

Three years ago, also on this very date, my dad died. I keep turning that over. Nineteen years since the thing that made me who I am started; three years since the man who made me, full stop, ended. Same square on the calendar. I don’t believe the universe schedules these things: the universe can barely coordinate the F train. But if it did have a booking system, this is exactly the kind of dark, economical joke it would write. Setup in 2007. Tag in 2023. Callback every July for the rest of my life.

I’ve noticed the two anniversaries have started keeping each other company. The sad one stops the proud one getting smug. The proud one stops the sad one swallowing the whole day. It turns out grief and comedy are perfectly happy sharing a table, which anyone who has ever been to a comedian’s funeral could have told me.

So I didn’t do a gig tonight. I had lunch with two friends who love the machinery of jokes as much as I do, and we sat there taking language apart, and somewhere in the middle of it I thought: this is the job. Not the spotlight. This. The shop talk. The vegan quiche. The nineteen-year attempt to earn a second laugh from a stranger in a pub in Perth.

I hope he’s still out there, whoever he was.

I hope he knows what he started.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS: If this one landed, restack it on Notes. Morris has been informed it is my comedy anniversary and has responded with the same level of enthusiasm he brings to all my achievements, which is to say he sneezed on my shoe and went back to sleep.

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July 6th, 2023
Jersey Shore, NJ

I’m currently bonking my tilted head with my palm, trying to get sand out of my ear.

In nine full years of living in New York, I’d never once been to the Jersey Shore— all I’d ever heard about it was there was something called a Snooki and that it had great scallops. And lots of house-sized flags. It was the perfect place to spend our first July 4th as a US citizen.

“Sketch On The Beach”

It was quite an experience, plonking ourselves down in the sand with our American pals and celebrating the holiday as traditionally as we could, with sun, sand, and drinking lots of booze out of red solo cups.

I spent a lot of time drawing in my sketchbook (I’m very social) and capturing what I could of the people around me. My pal Tristan really liked the drawing I did of him while our pasty white skin baked in the breeze and an endless squadron of single-engine planes towing banner ads chugged overhead.

Ice Cream Guy!

Every so often a man would appear from behind the dunes and ring a loud bell, sending every child within earshot into a frenzy. They all know what the bell means: It means Ice Cream. Lots of ice cream. (Cash only.)

One Country Under God.
One Trip From the House.

Tristan’s old pal Morgan drove in from Missouri to join the fun. We had a lot of fun chats about his small business which is fast becoming a not-so-small business. He had crazy life stories, ageless wisdom, and a guitar that looked like it had been used as a weapon. (It still played flawlessly). He and his young family showed me how it’s done when lugging all of your stuff from the house to the beach in a single trip, Hobbit style. It’s quite a skill.

Running (for) Water

Like an idiot who thinks he’s in shape, I tried to go for a run on the first morning in the stinking 300-degree humidity. After mile three, I changed states from solid to liquid. If it weren’t for the kind stranger who left a cooler full of tiny water bottles on their lawn, I would have made the full transition into a gas.

Chillin’ With the Wee Sand Chickens

Tristan’s kids were endlessly entertaining: Phoenix would lean into my ear and quietly tell me about his nightmares of a monster named Siren-Head, and Fox would burn me alive with devastating roasts about my shirt out of nowhere. He has a bright future as a judge on Roast Battle. All was well when their mama brought out the watermelon.

July Fwoooar!

Thanks to a visit to my brilliant editor, Justine and her family’s place for dinner, we were full of so much food and patriotic glee by the time we boarded the bus back to New York.

We ambled on over to our friend’s place in Long Island City to watch the Macy’s Fireworks Display from their apartment window— the view was bonkers.

The NYC crowds ended up being treated to a mesmerizing drone swarm before the big banging noises. The Ooohs and Aaahs swelled as the show culminated in a rotating, pulsing scale model of the entire Statue of freakin’ Liberty…

See more from my July 4th Fireworks Experience here.

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Creative Boom ran their flagship 2026 industry survey - 882 creative professionals, weighted UK and US, nearly half of them with more than a decade of scars to show for it. The findings landed on me the way most surveys do: with the stark, clinical thrill of being told by a stranger that your suspicions about yourself were correct all along.

The headline number is burnout. A massive 69% (heh) of respondents say they've experienced burnout in the past 12 months. And before you assume that's just the kids who can't handle a deadline: mid-career creatives report the highest burnout rate at 77%. That's my cohort. The people old enough to run the projects and young enough to still answer the emails at midnight..

The report’s theory is that it’s the mid-career people running projects, managing junior staff and fielding client demands without the authority to say no who are taking the worst of it. I felt that one in my teeth. There is an exhaustion that comes from being trusted with everything except the power to refuse any of it.

Then there’s the robot in the room…

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86% of respondents now use AI tools in their work. Eighty. Six.
…And yet only 10% of creatives think AI's overall effect on the industry is positive. Sit with that gap for a sec. Nearly everyone's using the thing. Almost nobody thinks the thing is good. We have, as a profession, collectively agreed to date someone we openly despise.

The report puts it better than I can. (Read it here) It describes a community adapting under duress, using AI not out of enthusiasm but because it feels compelled to, while bracing for it; hedging its bets while it waits to see how client expectations, pricing and competition shift awkwardly around it. (Spoiler alert: we don’t have time to wait for that )

And now we arrive at the part where I’d suggest you top up whatever you’re drinking…

Because the money is where the survey stops being darkly funny and just goes dark. Half of the respondents feel less financially secure than they did a year ago, compared with just 18% who feel more secure. And for the freelancers -my people, the dip-pen-and-mild-dread brigade- nearly 47% of self-employed creatives in the survey earn less than £30,000 a year ($39k in the US).

The report is careful to note that this is a workforce stocked to the brim with experienced professionals, 43% of whom have more than a decade behind them. Some of them, two decades+ (ahem.) So this isn't a room full of beginners finding their feet. It's a room full of people who are very good at what they do, earning well below the median salary, with none of the safety net a salary usually drags along behind it. As someone who left a salary and a country to chase this exact life, I read that figure and did the laugh you do when crying seems excessive for a Tuesday morning.

There was one finding that made me actually cackle... When asked which design trend they were most sick of, the creatives didn't say gradients. They didn't say minimalism. One answer dominated by a wide margin: AI (with more than 70 mentions). Remember when those kinds of stylistic niggles were the biggest bugbear for visual creatives? Happy days…

We used to argue about fucking drop shadows. Now we argue about the end of human authorship.

Growth. 🤌

The awards, predictably, are being quietly abandoned. A full 80% of respondents haven’t entered an award in the past year, and only 12% still believe awards meaningfully help careers. As a former president of two cartoonists’ societies, I should probably be wounded by this. I’m not. I’ve stood in enough awards-night ballrooms, clapping for a trophy I didn’t win, holding a beer the temperature of human breath, to understand exactly why a burnt-out freelancer earning forty grand might decide the entry fee could be better spent on, say, cup noodles.

But here’s the turn. Here’s the bit that I keep coming back to, sober.

When the survey asked what would actually help, the answer wasn’t software. It wasn’t a better AI plug-in or Agent; Networking and community came top, cited by 57.5%, with mentorship close behind at 53%. New tools and technology trailed well behind, at just 31%.

People. The thing creatives say they need most is other people.

The report’s instinct is right: the temptation in a bad year is to retreat. Get your head down, cut costs, skip the conference, let memberships lapse. Become a hermit with a Wacom tablet. I know that instinct intimately, because I am writing this from an apartment in which the most reliable colleague is a snoring dog.

But the survey’s closing line is the truest thing in it, and I’ll paraphrase rather than mangle it: the creatives struggling most don’t want another dashboard. They want a room full of people who understand what they’re going through, and someone a few years ahead willing to offer a hand.

I think that’s why I DO keep going to the National Cartoon Society Reuben Awards every year, and why I meet up with the local chapters whenever there is an event. The NCS has become my ‘found family’, but even more, a huge support network that I simply can’t live without. These are the people who do what I do, who are experiencing what I experience, and they have a lot of knowledge to share -and are more than willing to share it.

It’s also why I keep doing the live shows like Picture This, the lectures, the nights where I stand in front of strangers and make a fool of myself with a microphone. Not because they pay well (reader, they do not). But because for an hour I’m in a room full of people who get it. And on the current evidence, that room is the only thing in this entire industry that’s still appreciating in value.

The robot can have the gradients.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

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July 5th, 2014
Honolulu, HI

I landed in America on the 4th of July.

I donated or sold just about everything I’d accumulated over 29 years living in Australia. The stuff I kept was crammed into a bloated suitcase before squeezing onto a plane to start a new life: No plan, no job waiting, and no idea what I was going to do when I landed.

The Americans seemed very happy to see me when I landed — they threw a big party with fireworks and everything. People even took Monday off work!

It was a sorely needed reprieve from the anxiety-riddled gauntlet of these previous two years, waiting desperately to hear from the United States Citizenship & Immigration Service (USCIS) on whether the latest stage of the green card application had been approved so I could move forward.

The hundred-odd nights leading up to the final ‘Permanent Resident’ status being approved were pure torture. I ground my teeth down to powdery nubs in my sleep, confabulating every conceivable nightmare scenario where something went wrong, and I had to go to the back of the line and start over.

I have a lot of respect for anyone who has ever tried to emigrate to the United States, and understand the deep, profound relief of getting your passport stamped and stepping past the Customs desk for the first time as a newly minted resident.

When you land in the US and pass customs, there’s a huge escalator that takes you down to baggage claim. Just overhead, as you descend, are an enormous American flag and a picture of the incumbent Commander in Chief off to the side.

It is 2014. Barack Obama is president, ‘Gas’ is $3.63 per gallon, and my arm is still swollen from the eight vaccinations I had to get before flying to the US. Is Polio still a thing? And what the hell is Pertussis?

July 29, 2014
New York, NY

After a month of crashing at a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment in Inwood, I finally found a place to live. The hunt for an apartment in New York is incredibly challenging when you, A.) Don’t have a credit rating, B.) Don’t have a rental history and C.) Don’t have an entire year’s worth of rent in the bank. Some places ask for twelve months’ rent upfront. It’s crazy. Who has that kind of money?

Finding it was a total fluke: a perfect New York moment:

My wife at the time had been invited by a friend to an event at the Australian Consulate-General in midtown. After a few free chardonnays, she got chatting with the hilarious bartender, who mentioned she knew someone who might have a place we could see, but she wasn’t sure if it was already rented out.

The place was in Alphabet City:

The lowest, Eastest part of the East Village. I took a green cab (Ooer) downtown the following afternoon. The whole neighbourhood is legendary for hosting, at one time or another, some of the greatest creative minds in music, painting, writing, and acting.

There’s an energy to the place that buzzes through your whole body. The sirens, the smells, the mess of it all. It’s some real old-school New York shit, and I really like it.

After passing about 20 bodegas and several prehistoric dives, I pulled up in front of an old building about a block south of the Nuyorican Poets Café, between Avenues C and D. It was affectionately called “Bullet Space”.*1

*Bullet Space was so named as, back in the 80s, it was the best spot to get high-quality cocaine in New York. Movie stars would send their nervous assistants downtown, sometimes with a gun to retrieve it. They didn’t always expect them to return. (Bullet refers to the snuff bullet one stores their cocaine in. I’m told.)

The pre-law tenement was built in 1867 and was originally constructed as part of a row of three. The other two buildings had since been demolished. The original owner, John G. Costar, became very wealthy when he sold his previous property to John Jacob Astor for the construction of the Astor House.

“Up To Code”

In 1983, an artist named Andrew Castrucci, along with his brother and a friend, moved into this building as squatters.  They put on art shows and plays in their space and called their gallery and community Bullet Space. In 1998, the New Museum of Contemporary Art held an exhibition that showcased Bullet Space’s art, poetry readings, and performances.

In 2002, after a deal negotiated by the City and the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, the squatters, who were lighting fires inside to stay warm and lugging water from the sidewalk fire hydrant up the stairs in buckets, were allowed to purchase the building for $1 and become its legal occupants.

I buzzed 5B and didn’t get any response. I peeped in through the glass door to see that the lobby was an art gallery space. There was an exhibition of paper maché heads and other cool oddities.

I tried a few more times, then called the number I was given by the bartender, and the landlord picked up. “Sorry, I’m out the back!” she said. “Let me come get you.”

I waited by the door, next to an old chair with a crutch leaning against it (“John’s chair”, where he waits for his sandwich.) until a short, dark-haired woman came to the door, all smiles.

She was with a friend and invited me up to see the place on the 5th floor of the 147-year-old walk-up. I had to stop on the 4th floor to catch my breath and wipe the sweat out of my eyes. I looked up and saw an entire American flag made out of Coke and Pepsi cans.

No air conditioning, no elevator, just some old steps and banisters made out of scraps found around the city over the years. It was perfect.
We finally got up to 5A (“Hey, same apartment number as Jerry!”) and pushed open the heavy steel door.

It was basically a kitchen with a bathroom attached to it. There was a bunk above the sink if anyone wanted to crash and didn’t mind the sound of the dripping tap. There was a small spider hanging from the bookshelf. We called him John Jacob Astor.

The bedroom was the size of a walk-in closet, with an old mattress on the ground and an old, non-functioning air conditioner hanging out of the window. The only light was from a bulb plugged into an old lamp base on the ‘bedside’ table. If I climbed onto the roof, I could see the top of the Empire State Building.

The landlord asked what I did, and mentioned that everyone in the building is an artist of one kind or another:

“There’s a drummer, a couple of painters, a junk artist, a photographer, a writer, oh —and the poet laureate of the Lower East Side.” They’ve all lived here for decades and are probably still paying rent in beaver pelts and rare trinkets.

After a few beers, we discussed the rent. It was high for what it was but low for immigrants with no rental history. We were told that to stay there, you had to make your living as an artist. I pulled out a pen, asked for a scrap of paper, and drew a 2-minute sketch of the landlord.
She took it, smiled, and said, “The place is yours if you want it!”

I moved in the next day.

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[ This is the building I would end up calling home for the next seven years. ]

IMAGES BELOW:

Photos from Bullet Space:

I was standing in my kitchen the other morning, waiting for the coffee to revive my aching corpse, and I caught myself reaching for my phone.

Nothing had happened. No buzz, no notification, no summons from the wider world. The coffee-maker simply had the audacity to take ninety seconds, and my hand went for the phone the way a smoker’s hand goes for the pack: not a decision, a reflex. A small, sad, fully automated reach toward a glowing rectangle, because the alternative, standing in my own kitchen with my own thoughts, had become genuinely unbearable.

I put the phone down. Then I picked it back up. Then I put it down again and watched the coffee maker, as if it owed me money.

This, I have come to understand, is what I do now. I do not have moments. I have content gaps.

For most of last year, I had earbuds in for roughly ninety per cent of my waking life. Walking back from the gym: podcast. On the subway: more podcasts, or a man called Tim explaining how to live. Or the NYT Crossword app. Colouring a cartoon at the drawing board? Netflix going in the background, doing nothing but flickering, a televised nightlight for a grown adult. The remaining ten per cent of the day, the bit where my brain might actually catch up on the firehose of input I’d been aiming at it, did not exist. I had outsourced all of that processing to sleep, which is presumably why I spent the year sleeping like a guilty man being interrogated by detectives.

I did not think of this as a problem. I thought of it as being efficient. Optimised. A productivity hack, which is a phrase I have used unironically and out loud, in front of other adults, and for which I can only apologise.

Then, in one of those productivity newsletters I was almost certainly listening to instead of experiencing my own life, I came across the computer scientist Cal Newport, who had a phrase that lodged itself in me like a splinter: embrace boredom.

His argument, as I understood it, standing on a subway platform with three things playing at once, was this. The ability to concentrate is a skill, like a muscle, and you have to train it. And every time you reach for your phone at the first faint whiff of boredom, you are training the opposite. You are teaching your brain that boredom is an emergency, and that the cure is an immediate hit of novelty.

So your brain, being a fast learner and a coward, comes to expect the hit. And then one day you sit down to do something genuinely difficult and important, something with no moment-to-moment sparkle to it, and your brain simply refuses. It has been raised to believe that boredom is a fire alarm. It does not understand that you have asked it, on purpose, to sit in the smoke.

I read that and felt a full-body cringe at being described accurately by a stranger.

So, I started meditating again, which I had done before and abandoned, the way I abandon all good habits, quietly and with great relief. (I have begun and quietly quit meditation roughly the number of times most people quit smoking.) And the meditation itself mattered less than what it revealed, which was the sheer frequency of the reach. The hand to the pocket. Dozens of times an hour. A twitch I had never once noticed because I had never once been still enough to notice it.

Here is the thing nobody tells you, and the reason I’m bothering to rewrite a six-year-old blog post about it: boredom is not the absence of something. It is The Something.

Creativity needs quiet, the way a photograph needs a darkroom.

The reason you get your best ideas in the shower is not that the shower is magic. It’s that the shower is the one place left where nobody can reach you, and nothing is playing, and your hands are busy with a task so ancient and automatic that your mind is finally, blessedly, off the leash. The good ideas were always in there. You’d just never given them a room with the lights off.

So.

Taking a walk? Take the earbuds out. Just walk. You will hate it for four minutes, and then something in your chest will unclench.

Taking a bath? (A ScotchBath, I’d hope.) Don’t take a book. Just sit in the warm water like a Victorian recovering from a diagnosis.

Taking a baby? Put it back. Don’t take babies.

I now block out whole stretches of the day with nothing in them. On purpose. Empty boxes in the calendar, defended like they’re meetings with someone important, which, it turns out, they are. The results have been faintly ridiculous. The empty time has produced more usable ideas than any of the time I carefully filled. It’s as though I spent years shouting suggestions at my own subconscious, and the moment I shut up, it finally got a word in.

I’m not fully cured. I reached for my phone twice while writing this. But I’m getting better at standing in my own kitchen, watching a coffee maker, being a person with a mind and a morning and no soundtrack.

It’s the most boring thing I do all day. I recommend it without reservation.

‘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.

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I have never been a big basketball person.

Let me be clear about what that means. It means that on the night of Saturday the 13th of June, when the New York Knicks won their first championship in fifty-three years, I was catching up on the players’ names two minutes before the final buzzer. I’m the fairest of fairweather fans.

And yet. By the end of the night I was out in the streets of this preposterous city, hoarse, hugging people I will never see again, and weeping slightly at a fire hydrant for reasons I could not at the time and cannot now fully articulate. New York had not won a thing like this since 1973. Most of the people screaming in the West Village had not been alive for it. I had not been alive for it. I am not even from here. None of this stopped me. I was swept up like a leaf in a storm drain, and I went willingly.

(For the curious and the morbid, the full visual record of my descent that night lives here on my Instagram. I make no apologies and offer no commentary. The footage speaks, slurringly, for itself.)

So that was the state of me the following morning when I sat down to draw a cartoon for The David Prize’s newsletter, New York’s Newsletter. Scott and I had cooked up the idea as an absurd parody of a joke… then realised it might actually work. The best gags are usually a two-man job, like carrying a wardrobe up a narrow staircase -and there was a deadline, and there was me, a man whose skull felt like it was being gently reorganised from the inside by a small, irritable committee of bees.

This is the part where I’m meant to tell you about the tools…

Here is what I drew it with. Brace yourself, because it is genuinely the least romantic answer in the history of art.

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I have never been to Rego Park on purpose. I’m not sure anyone has.

You don’t go to that part of Queens; you wash up there, the way a single thong washes up on a beach, and you stand around wondering what current brought you in. The current, on this particular night, was Kelsey Grammer.

Let me back up.

There is a kind of New York evening that arrives with no announcement, no posters, no press, that turns out to be one of the strangest nights of your life. This was that. The only two corners of the internet that knew it was happening were a brewery called Faith American and a cigar lounge called Havana Dreams, and neither of them, frankly, seemed entirely sure either. There had been zero publicity. None. For a reason I’d later understand and find oddly moving: the SAG strike was on. Grammer wasn’t allowed to promote the Frasier reboot, which was premiering that very night on Paramount+. So instead of a red carpet, he had a humidor in Queens. Instead of a press junket, he had me and my cartoonist friends.

I should explain why I was there at all, because on paper I am the least likely person in that room. I’m an Australian cartoonist who draws for a living and apologises for existing. I am not, by temperament, a man who fawns over celebrities. I once stood next to a Hemsworth at a barbecue and managed only to ask him whether he wanted onions on his hot dog.

But here is the part I don’t say out loud at parties.

Frasier saved my life.

Not in the way people mean when they say a TV show “saved their life,” which usually means it was on while they ate a sandwich. I mean during the pandemic, when -with the exception of 7pm- the city went quiet, and the walls of my tiny East Village walk-up began their slow, patient closing-in, the thing that got me to morning was Dr Frasier Crane. It was running on Netflix then, the whole run, and I would put away three, four, five episodes a day. Three before bed, minimum, the way other people take a tablet. There was something about that warm, jazzy, oblivious world, that very particular fictional Seattle, all sherry and apricot walls and brothers being insufferable at each other, a pre-everything calm I could climb inside and pull shut behind me.

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I got hooked on the nostalgia of it. The whole Frasurbane of the thing, before I knew that was a word other people had also coined in their own lonely apartments. A spin-off from Cheers, of all the unlikely lineages, this fussy radio psychiatrist peeled off from a Boston bar and given his own life two thousand miles away. When I finally got to Boston, I went to the actual Cheers bar like a pilgrim, and they had a life-sized cardboard cutout of Grammer from his Cheers years, younger, with the longer hair, the mullet, frankly. I stood in front of it for longer than a grown man should. It cheered me up.

I’m not too proud to tell you that a piece of laminated cardboard in a tourist trap did more for my mental health that year than several actual professionals.

So when my friend , who is a Frasier superfan of a devotion that makes mine look like a passing interest, mentioned there was a thing in Queens, I went. Ie got there before Hilary did, which means that according to the official record, the canonical comic Hilary later drew of the entire evening, the first two things she noticed upon entering were, in order: 1. Cigar smoke and 2. Me and 3. Kelsey Grammer “just hangin out like old pals.”

The lounge was full of what Hilary would immortalise as the “cigar men of Queens,” a category of human I’d never knowingly encountered: large, contented men sitting in deep leather chairs, side by side, not speaking. Not to each other, not to anyone. Just sitting, smoking, gazing into the middle distance like a Rothko exhibition that had given up. Grammer himself found this unnerving, and said so, that all these men could sit beside one another in total silence. I thought it was the most honest thing in the room.

Cartoons by Hilary

Me & Frasier

To read my post on everything that lead up to this and my love for Frasier, go here…

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3 years ago · 20 likes · 13 comments · Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

We ended up out the back. Several of us, sharing cigars, just hanging about and talking the way you do when the night has decided to be a long one. There’s a thing that happens out the back of a place like that, away from the television and the silent men, where time goes loose, and you forget the situation is absurd, and for a while you’re just a few people in a cloud of smoke in Queens, and one of them happens to be a sitcom legend. I was drinking a Coke, for some reason. He commented on it and suggested I buy one of his beers.

And then he started to weep.

Not at us. At the beer. He’d snuck to the front of the bar, and had been telling the story behind the Faith American can, his brewery, the one he’d named, he said, because he loved Faith, his daughter, and he loved America, in that order, and it would be churlish of me to point out that this is also a sentence a cartoon villain says before flooding a town. He read out the label.

There was a whole legend printed on it about the Anti-Rent War, about men on a full moon riding down on the sheriff’s men of Andes, New York, costumed and freedom-minded, the Calico Men, riding into “this singular, distant page of American History.” And as he read it, the great man’s eyes filled, and spilled, and there it was: Kelsey Grammer, crying, in a cigar lounge in Rego Park, about a nineteenth-century tax revolt printed on a beer can.

Hilary and James were a few feet away. Hilary, in her comic, draws her own thought bubble at this exact moment, and it reads: Kelsey Grammer is crying to me about something called the Anti-Rent War. I had the same bubble. We just rendered it differently. She let hers show on her face.

I was trying to stay cool.

You should know how excited I actually was. Underneath the flat Australian affect, the laminated-cutout-in-Boston of it all, I was a man watching the figure who had got him through the worst year of his life stand three feet away and openly feel things about a beer. I was, to use a word my people reserve for moments of genuine internal weather, chuffed. Deeply, helplessly chuffed.

I spent the entire encounter performing the opposite, nodding sagely at the can, holding my cigar, going “mm” and “right” and “that’s a lot of history for a lager,” while inside the apricot walls of my own ridiculous heart, eleven-thirty-pm-pandemic-me was screaming.

Hilary felt it all on the surface and let it pour out: the hugs, the kiss on the head he gave her, the “I love you, Hilary,” the drawing she made him on the back patio that took her three attempts because her hands were shaking. She got the religious experience. The full Lourdes.

She got him to sign the cartoon she drew of him in the New Yorker (A parody of Hellraiser) before he hugged her. She was in a surreal daze.

We left when he left, because there is no reason to stay at a party once the icon has gone home to bed. On the way out he was still in good cheer, still talking about his beer, telling us with great sincerity that sometimes you have to try someone else’s beer and it’s terrible and you have to lie, but that he was proud of his own. I believed him. I believe a man who weeps at his own label is not lying about anything.

Hilary was frantically scribbling down details of the encounter for her comic, not wanting to lose any of the granularity of the night.

The reboot, for the record, was not very good. Nobody really watched it. It came, and it went, the way these things do, the way Rego Park does, a current that brings something in and then takes it back out. But I wasn’t there for the reboot. I was there, it turns out, to stand in a cloud of smoke and quietly thank a man who’ll never know he sat up with me through 2020, one apricot-walled episode at a time.

I didn’t say any of that, of course. I asked him something about his beer.

‘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.

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Every guest who sits down for one of the app’s Conversations gets a hand-drawn portrait: real ink, real paper, real swearing when the nib catches. I wrote about the whole collaboration here, back when I called it the most fulfilling project of my career. I stand by that. It remains the only job I’ve ever had where the brief is essentially “please stare at interesting people’s faces for hours,” which is what I was doing on the subway for free anyway.

But this week’s portrait was different, because this week’s portrait was Susan Cain.

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Some books arrive at exactly the right moment in your life. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking arrived at mine as a court summons. Here I was, a stand-up comedian who spends his evenings shouting into microphones in basements, reading a book that gently explained I was, in fact, an introvert: a person who finds other people enjoyable in roughly the way one with Irish skin finds the sun delightful. Wonderful. Essential. Best enjoyed in limited doses before retreating somewhere dark to recover.

It rearranged the furniture in my head. I stopped apologising for leaving parties early. I stopped treating the need for silence as a personality flaw to be managed and started treating it as the place the work actually comes from. Every cartoon I’ve ever sold was drawn alone, in a quiet room, by a man avoiding a social engagement.

So drawing her face felt less like a commission and more like writing a thank-you note with a dip pen.

She’s a great writer. Precise, completely unsentimental about sentiment, which is the hardest trick in the book. And her conversation with Sam on the Waking Up app is well worth your ears. If you’ve ever suspected the world was designed by and for people who think out loud, she’ll confirm it, then explain what the rest of us are for.

She has a new #1 New York Times bestseller called “Bittersweet: How Sorrow And Longing Make Us Whole”, which is another brain-changer. You can find her talk in the Conversations section of the Waking Up app. Tell her portrait I said hello.

You can listen to the convo 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.

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Not the actual Lynda Barry; an original manuscript page from Cruddy, hanging on his studio wall next to an outtake from Making Comics. He calls them his Guardian Spirits, and the plan is to keep adding to them until he’s got a full pantheon of demigods looming over his desk.

I understand the impulse completely. I’ve got a drawing of Larry David in my studio that Luke Watson painted for me, and he glares at me every day with an expression that says, “Is that really the version you’re gonna go with? Aeeeeh, it’s prettaaay pretty good.”

This was Austin’s second time on Draw Me Anything, and I’d be lying if I said we covered the book in an orderly fashion. We started with 63 people in the chat and ended with 350, which means roughly 287 people wandered in midstream to find two middle-aged cartoonists arguing about whether Hook is secretly a midlife-crisis film.

It is. More on this later. It gets worse.
(Bangarang!)

Don’t Call It a Book Tour

The new book is called Don’t Call It Art, and Austin, a man committed to the bit, named the promotional run for it the Don’t Call It a Book Tour. Previous books got 25-city tours. This one got three cities: Austin, Nashville and Cleveland, which he described as “kind of like a straight shot to Cleveland type tour.”

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He slept in five beds in six days. “This is a young person’s game,” he said, and every comedian who’s ever done the road nodded so hard the vertebrae in their necks audibly clicked. The week after a launch, he told me, all the things that keep you alive as a creative person, the sleep, the walks, the daily ritual, go straight out the window. The man who wrote the book on sustainable creative practice blew himself out promoting a book about sustainable creative practice. “I wish the books worked on me better,” he said, which might be the most honest thing anyone has ever said on this series.

Nobody Knows Anything, Confidently

We got into the publishing industry, which Austin summarised via William Golding’s old line that nobody knows anything: true of Hollywood, true of books. Nobody in publishing knows what sells books, he said, “but they’ll say something confidently to you about it.” Everyone’s chasing BookTok, which is lightning in a bottle, on purpose, which is not how lightning or bottles work.

The only thing that actually sells a book, he said, quoting Ann Patchett, is one person holding it up and saying I love this. Word of mouth. That’s it. That’s the whole machine.

And then he reached for Charles Portis, because of course he did. There’s a line in Gringos about two men who “had known the despair of selling things that people didn’t want,” and Austin pointed out that this is the entire creative life. Nobody is asking for another book. Nobody asked for another cartoon. Nobody wanted a live-action Moana. You make the thing anyway, and then you present it, over and over, like Marshawn Lynch running through a man’s chest. Austin apparently plays the Beast Mode clip to himself on a loop when the self-promotion shame creeps in. If you run through somebody’s face, over and over and over and over and over …. eventually they can’t take it any more. This is also, coincidentally, my approach to open mics.

The shame is real, though. You think: my audience must be so sick of hearing about this thing. Meanwhile, an actual paid subscriber to Austin’s newsletter walked up to him in Nashville and said If I’d known you were in town, I’d have brought all my friends. The man works across the street from the hotel. He pays money to be told these things. He did not know.

So no. Nobody is sick of hearing about your thing.
They have not heard about your thing.

The Taco Bell Theory of Art

My favourite framework of the day came from, and I want to be clear that I am quoting a bestselling author here, Taco Bell. Austin loves their “distinctiveness rule”: you can change the taste, or you can change the form, but never both at once. That’s how he thinks about his readers. Keep the familiar square format, but fill this book with his kids’ drawings and new textures, so it reads like an Austin Kleon book that was somehow drawn by his children. (This “RED” rule stands for relevance, ease, and distinctiveness.)

He’s unapologetic about thinking of his audience while he works, which felt almost transgressive to hear out loud. “My readers have given me everything,” he said. “This idea that I wouldn’t think about them when I was writing is just weird to me.” His books, he insists, aren’t pure art anyway; they’re the byproducts of him trying to make stuff. The Montel Jordan principle: this is how we do it. Not how you have to do it. This is how we do it.

Neither of us went to art school, which is probably why we both find kids so instructive. They don’t know the correct way to do anything, so they just let it rip.

Why the Book Exists at All

The title comes from a John Baldessari quote: I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. Kids don’t call it art. They’re not making Art; they’re just doing stuff. There’s a Brian Eno line in the book to match: people do much better when they don’t think they’re being artists. If you don’t call it art, you’re likely to get a better result.

Austin described the book as being for anyone who’s lost that lovin’ feeling: you’ve been doing the work a long time, maybe even successfully, and the joy has quietly left the building. Where Keep Going was about pushing through a world gone mad, this one is Keep Going 2.0: the call is coming from inside the house. The chaos isn’t out there. It’s in here, with the deadlines and the invoices and the creeping suspicion that your passion has become your landlord.

I know this feeling intimately. Twenty-one years as a full-time cartoonist, and people still say “you’re so lucky, you get to do what you love every day,” and I want to grab them by the lapels and explain that they have no idea how hard it is to stay in love with a thing that is actively driving you insane. It’s not drudgery exactly. It’s more like the fruit has started to turn, and instead of leaping out of bed to bite the apple you’re standing in the kitchen at 7am wondering if you can make some sort of bread out of it.

Charlie Bucket’s Midlife Crisis

Which brings me to my Willy Wonka theory. End of the film. Great Glass Elevator. Wonka looks down at Charlie and says, “Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he ever wanted.” Charlie asks what. And Wonka says he lived happily ever after, but what he should say is:

He had to run a chocolate factory. Payroll for the Oompa Loompas. Health and safety inspections. Wait until they unionise next summer. I think about Charlie Bucket’s midlife crisis constantly. Charlie at 45, staring out over the Fizzy Lifting Drinks Room, thinking I thought I wanted this.

Austin, it turns out, came at the same territory through Jungian theory, because he’s classier than I am. He’d been reading James Hollis, and the Jungians treat midlife as a time of return: you’ve spent decades building the armour and the castle, becoming who you are in the world, and then the question arrives like a bailiff.

“Who were you before you built all this?”

His favourite version of the question, the one he asks everyone in his typewriter interviews: what did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? People deflect with jokes at first. But push past that, and it’s always there. Drawing. Reading. Music. The thing that originally activated you. It’s still in you. You just have to reconnect with it.

So Austin is picking up dropped threads. Music consumed him as a teenager, so now he’s in a dad band that practises every weekend and has performed exactly one show, with a second looming. And he rides his bike, which produced the single best line of the night, the one I’ll be chewing on for months:

He grew up on a country road outside Circleville, Ohio, in the middle of what he describes as half cornfield, half bean field, depending on the year. He had the bike. There was nowhere to ride it. Time, space and materials, the equation at the heart of the book: you need all three, and if your creative life is broken, one of them is missing. He had the materials. He didn’t have the space. Forty years later, he’s reclaiming the ride he never got.

That’s the real engine of the book, and it’s why it isn’t a parenting book or a kids’ book, despite everyone begging him to write one. The breakthrough came from a Fiona Apple interview. She mentioned she reads parenting books. The interviewer, baffled, asked if she has kids or wants them. No, she said, but if she’s struggling with something, parenting books are just solid advice for humans. The interviewer said, “So you’re the parent and the child.” And Fiona Apple replied:

“Don’t you always have to be?”

Austin said a big Charlie Brown thought-balloon shot up out of his head. That’s the book. When you get older, you have to show yourself the care of a loving parent, so the wild creative kid in you feels safe enough to come out and let it rip. Not all the time. Just every once in a while.

(We then spent several minutes agreeing that Fetch the Bolt Cutters is THE pandemic album, dogs barking and all, and Austin shared that when he told his son she recorded some of it in GarageBand, the kid replied, “No wonder her name’s Apple. On brand.” Children are a bottomless font of one-liners, and they don’t even invoice you.)

One for Them, One for Me

We talked craft, too. I told him about my caricature rule from live-drawing gigs: I do the kind version for the punter, then go home and draw the version I actually wanted to make. One for them, one for me. If the drawing you sold isn’t the drawing you needed, you owe yourself the second one.

Austin does the same with his kids’ artwork, photographing it at the exact moment before they add the evil villain who ruins everything. Every parent of a small artist knows that moment. The piece is finished. The child does not agree.

This led us to Ralph Steadman, via Hunter S. Thompson’s Kentucky Derby piece, which Austin had just re-read and which is secretly a story about Thompson begging Steadman to stop showing his grotesque drawings to the people he’d drawn, lest they both get punched in the teeth. The eternal question of that partnership: who was the real wild man? Steadman, we agreed, is an introverted wild man, the best kind, flicking ink at a blank page in his shed, ukulele within reach. Do you ever see someone and think, that’s what I want to be when I grow up? For both of us it’s Steadman. And Quentin Blake. And Hockney. And Barry Blitt, who, as Austin put it, is lit.

I also discussed this week’s published New Yorker cartoon (the Knicks one, this week) perched on top of roughly 4,000 pencil roughs nobody will ever see. Austin called it my personal rejection collection. Behind every yes is a thousand no’s, and nobody sees the no’s. There’s a whole chapter in his book called Make a Pile of Imperfect Things, which I intend to use as a legal defence for the state of my studio.

Pilgrimage Season

Final order of business: Columbus, Ohio. If you can get to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, the Chris Ware exhibition is one of the best things Austin has ever seen, and he grew up 40 minutes from the place. One side of the floor teaches you how comics work; the other side is a man who devoured the entire history of the form and rebuilt it inside his beautiful neurodiverse noggin.

The Billy is Disneyland for cartoonists, genuinely my favourite place in America, and I’ll be there twice in August: once for the National Cartoonists Society’s 80th anniversary and the Reuben Awards, and again for the Columbus Comedy Festival. Austin asked how you get an invite to the NCS thing. You don’t. You just come. (He’s coming.)

He’s also going to email the Billy and see if they’ll do a Substack Live walking tour. Watch this space.

Look. That’s the broad strokes, but the full replay has so much more: Me scribbling live, the chat going feral, the Russell Brand digression I have wisely omitted from this recap, and the moment a man blanked on the name of an author whose book was directly behind his head (It was Paul Jarvis!). Upgrade to paid, and you can watch the whole hour, plus the full archive of every Draw Me Anything so far.

Buy Don’t Call It Art if you want it. If you don’t, don’t. Don’t call it art. But do subscribe to Austin’s newsletter, which is easily one of my favourite things on the internet, written by one of the most generous people in it.

‘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.

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He walked in with a blind doodle of my face he’d drawn while we waited to go live, and then proceeded to dismantle nearly everything I believed about being a tortured artist. His whole pitch was that the tragic-genius model (the special soul who suffers, succeeds, and then drinks himself into a wall) is a trap, and that the better frame is comedy: an ordinary person who bumbles, fumbles, improvises, and survives on their wits. As an ordinary person who bumbles and survives largely on wit and instant noodles, I took this personally. (In the good way.)

Tomorrow -Thursday at 2:30 p.m. Eastern- Austin Kleon returns to Draw Me Anything!

Add it to your calendar now!

The reason for the visit: his new book, Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. It came out on the 2nd of June, the long-awaited follow-up to his Steal Like an Artist trilogy, and his first new book in seven years. I have read it. I am, to be transparent about my condition, obsessed with it.

Here’s the premise, and it’s a good one:

Kleon spent years being what he calls a “studio assistant” to his two young sons, and discovered that watching kids make things teaches you almost everything you’ve managed to forget. The title is lifted from the artist John Baldessari, who said he learned so much about art from watching a kid draw, because kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around and drawing; they’re just doing stuff. That’s the whole thing, really. Throw out the instructions. Give yourself permission to be bad. Stop calling it art and just do stuff. (You can buy it here)

I saw some quotes from the likes of John Cleese, Ray Bradbury, and Doris Lessing, who said artists who feel stuck will savour it. I’d go further. I think it’s the rare creativity book that doesn’t make you feel like you’re being scolded by a wellness app.

(I should flag, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I’ve now spent two paragraphs explaining a book whose entire thesis is “stop overthinking and just make the thing.” Austin, if you’re reading this: I’m aware. I contain multitudes, most of them contradictory.)

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It comes for the recovering perfectionist, the burnt-out professional, the recent art-school graduate, and (a phrase I love) the retiree hunting for a creative third act. Given who reads this newsletter, that last one may be the most relevant of the lot, and I mean that as the warmest possible compliment.

So come along on Thursday. Bring questions. Bring a pen if you’ve got one. I’ll be drawing live, asking him to explain how to unlearn a lifetime of bad creative habits in under an hour, and trying very hard not to look at the paper.

It’s going to be great. I can’t wait to share it with you.

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.

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I have spent a not-insignificant portion of my life drawing things that nobody asked me to draw. Like this bird.

That is, more or less, the job. You sit in a studio in Hell’s Kitchen with a flex nib and a flatulent dog, and you make marks on paper, and occasionally somebody pays you for it. It is a precarious living at the best of times. The rent goes up. The fees go down. Morris requires an alarming volume of food for an animal who contributes nothing but methane and pure unadulterated joy to the world.

And now there is a new wrinkle, which is that somewhere out there, a machine may have already eaten everything I have ever made.

Not metaphorically. Actually eaten it. Scraped it off the internet, fed it into the great churning maw of a training dataset, and digested my decades of nib-scratching into a statistical smoothie that it can now regurgitate, on demand, for someone who types “cartoon in the style of” into a box and hits enter. No credit. No payment. No idea I ever existed.

The trouble is, you can’t see inside the machine. It’s a black box. You suspect your work is in there, the way you suspect there’s a mouse behind the fridge, but you can’t prove it, and you certainly can’t get it back.

This is the bit where I tell you I’m not a neutral observer.

A couple of months ago, I sat down with two of the people trying to do something about all this. Sally Herships, who is a properly award-winning audio journalist and runs the audio program at Columbia Journalism School, along with Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Mark Fiore, have built a thing called Croquis.

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My actual contribution, such as it was, involved sitting with the team and helping wrestle their messaging into something a cartoonist might actually read without their eyes sliding off the page. Because here is a thing the tech world doesn’t always grasp: creators are a fantastically hard bunch to reach. We are suspicious of jargon. We are allergic to being sold to. Our Bullshit-Detectors are off-the-charts. We have all, at some point, been burned by a platform that promised to be on our side and then quietly changed its terms of service at two in the morning.

So I sat in on the wordsmithing. The one-sheet they’ve put out - the thing that explains the whole project - has my fingerprints on it, in the sense that I kept saying “no cartoonist will read that sentence” until the sentences got better. It is, I think, the most useful thing I have done with a pen all year that did not involve drawing a dog. You can read it below.

Croquis

166KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Ok, what is this thing and what does it do?

Here is what Croquis actually does, in plain terms: It pries the black box open. It scans AI models to tell you whether your work has been scraped without your permission -either by searching the giant piles of training data for your name and your art, or by interrogating the models themselves to see what they’ve quietly memorised. A new tool designed by researchers to help artists figure out where their work has gone is, frankly, the first piece of leverage most of us have ever had. You can’t demand compensation for a theft you can’t prove. Croquis is the proof.

And it’s coming from the right place. Croquis was created by Mark Fiore and Sally Herships with help from an AI scholar at Stanford, funded by grants from the Herb Block Foundation and the Brown Institute, which is to say: not by anyone who stands to profit from selling your data back to you.

Now, the proving is one half of the fight. The other half is stopping the theft before it happens, and this is where the talk they’re giving comes in.

Watch the Walkthrough, Live

On 16 June at 7pm ET, Mark and Sally are running a free virtual webinar through the National Cartoonists Society called Protecting Your Art in the Age of AI. It’s the practical companion to all of this. They’ll walk through how to tell whether your work has been scraped, and then how to fight back using a couple of tools that sound made up but are gloriously real.

Register for it here

The first is Nightshade. Developed by a team at the University of Chicago, it messes up training data in ways that damage image-generating AI models - dogs become cats, cars become cows. It subtly alters an image at the pixel level so that AI programs see something totally different from what’s actually there. The lead researcher, Ben Zhao, compared it to putting hot sauce in your lunch so it doesn’t get stolen from the office fridge. Which is, I think, the single best description of a piece of security software ever committed to the record.

The second is C2PA, or Content Credentials, which works the opposite way round. It’s an open standard that attaches cryptographically signed, tamper-evident provenance to a piece of media - like a digital nutrition label, showing who made it, how, and what changed. It won’t poison anything. It won’t stop a determined thief. It demonstrates that a signer made certain claims, not that those claims are accurate, and most platforms strip the data out anyway. But it’s a start - a way of saying this is mine, and here is the receipt.

Nightshade is the hot sauce. C2PA is the label on the lunchbox. Neither one alone saves your sandwich, but together they’re a great deal better than the nothing most of us are currently working with.

The webinar agenda runs through the whole landscape: what AI theft is and why it matters, how to know if you’ve been scraped, how to prevent it, and what comes next. (Yes, they’ll also cover the new French Darcos AI Bill from earlier this month.) They’ll demo the new tools they’re building - the ones meant to hand creators a bit of agency back in a fight that has, so far, been spectacularly lopsided.

You might think AI is a mysterious black box beyond your control.
It’s not. That’s the whole point. And for once, the people telling you so aren’t trying to sell you anything.

Register for the webinar here: Protecting Your Art in the Age of AI

And if you want to find out whether the machines have been chewing on your sketchbook, you can join the Croquis waiting list - the one-sheet I helped (gently, insistently) wrestle into plain English lives at SFAI.agency.

‘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.

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Good morning from New York!

I’m groggily writing this with the windows open, listening to the scrape of cleanup crews dragging last night out of Bryant Park. Oh, did I write JOY in the headline? I meant Booooos.

The Knicks lost. They didn’t just lose; they were cursed into losing, undone by a sleeping giant in the stands. A man so still, so blissfully unbothered, that the Jumbotron found him and the entire arena turned on him with a fury usually reserved for referees and people who stop at the top of subway stairs. They showed his face. They booed. I won’t name him. (He knows. The city knows. Bryant Park knows, and Bryant Park will be finding evidence of it for days.)

Quite the night.

Thank you to everyone for the kind words about Scott and my toon in yesterday’s New Yorker for the daily - it went a little nuts, to be honest. Knicks fans are VERY vocal on social media about ticket pricing. It’s a huge part of the conversation.

I’ve been writing a lot lately.

I don’t blame you if you haven’t had time to read all of it. I’ll post some stuff below you might have missed in case you get time to file it away for a quiet summer day by the pool…

1. I wrote about my cartoonist lunch with the Hollywood director Gus Van Sant where I pitched a joke and got giant groans from the table…
   

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1. I wrote about the increasingly impossible notion that an artist could use their social media following to reach the people who opted in to see their work…

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2. I wrote about drawing New Yorkers’ dogs for a dog rescue/adoption charity in the West Village…

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3. I wrote about drawing Michael Pollan for the Waking Up App…
   

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4. I wrote about busting Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s balls backstage at the Comedy Cellar before a live podcast taping
   

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5. I wrote about the ailing print media industry after seeing the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada in NYC
   

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6. Last but definitely not LEAST, I celebrated my little fur goblin’s 7th birthday!
   

   

   
   

50 Eps at 30 Rock

My friend Nayeema celebrated her 50th episode of Dumb Girl, Smart Questions at Rockefeller Centre this month, with a big blowout party at the newly opened Pebble Bar. I’m writing up her latest live episode taping with iconic New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, which happened to feature Anna Delvey in the crowd. You can read up on a previous live episode of the show here…

Slingin’ Zingers in Queens

After the insanity of the finals subsides (possibly?), you can catch me this coming Friday at “End of the Line Comedy” at QED in Astoria. Getcher tickets here!

My right shoulder is throbbing, which can mean only one thing…

That’s right— It’s that time of year again!
Time for another annual edition of:

Each week in summer, the New Yorker softball team meets to play writers, fact-checkers, cartoonists and staff who work at other magazines based in New York City. I am probably the least valuable member of the team, with the pitching arm of an old chair and the knees of a septuagenarian. That said, I do bring the warm beer…

I’m happy to report an opening day victory for the team last Tuesday, with an 8-7 walk-off win over Defector/HellGate. Tonight at 7 pm, we will look to extend our winning streak, facing The Infatuation at our home field of Central Park North Meadow #2.

The Sketchbook I’m sharing with you this week is a quick sketch I made on the High Line in Chelsea. I used to walk this every morning when I lived in Hudson Yards.

This week you can catch me talking with repeat guest about his epic new book DON’T CALL IT ART!

Add it to our calendar now

If you missed my previous 5 episodes since the last issue, you can catch up here:

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

Subscribe now

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

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Scott and I sold a cartoon to the New Yorker last week. It ran today.

Let me take the swagger out of that sentence immediately, because it arrived nothing like you’d imagine. No wood-panelled office, no monocle, no butler applauding softly from the wings. I submitted a batch. A batch is the polite word for a scrappy pile of ideas hastily scrawled in pencil, most of which will be rejected, some of which deserve to be. Mine were about the Knicks, who are in the finals, which in this city is treated as roughly equivalent to the Second Coming, only louder, and with worse beer.

Most of the batch died on the table. They always do. You learn to grieve quickly.

But one survived. A map of Madison Square Garden seen from above, the seating sections labelled not by price but by status: Celebrities. Finance and tech bros. Your boss’s boss’s boss. Real fans who are terrible with money. And down in the corner, an X. That’s you.

It started, as these things do, in a Google Doc with my writing partner, Scott. Noodling. Noodling is the technical term for two grown men typing half-jokes at each other across NYC at hours when sensible adults are asleep.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about courtside at the Garden. It is not a money hierarchy. It is a status one. Half the celebrities don’t pay a cent; the tickets arrive gratis because their faces sell the broadcast. The hedge-fund guy three seats back paid more than your apartment is worth and is, socially speaking, furniture. To confirm I had the pecking order right, I texted my mate Ronny, who is frequently in the front row, close enough to know precisely who sits where and which of them got in for free. He confirmed the hierarchy. He fact-checks the rich for me, no charge.

Now. I work by hand. All of it.

I know this makes me sound like a man who churns his own butter, but I use a Hunt 101 nib in a dip pen, with Higgins Black India ink, on actual paper, and I will not be taking questions. I draw it, then I scan it. That is the whole religion.

What you don’t see in the finished cartoon is how much of it is just the same thing, drawn again and again until my hand stops getting it wrong…

Take the word “celebrities.” I wrote it perhaps fourteen times. SEAT MAP, SEATING MAP, SEAT MEAP (a typo I briefly considered keeping, because it sounded like a noise of despair). M.S.G with the full stops, M.S.G without, MSG like a seasoning. You hand-letter a word enough times, and it stops being a word and becomes a small angry centipede.

Then the logo. The Knicks logo famously lives dead centre on the court, so I couldn’t fake it. I drew it by hand, in blue pencil first to rough the shape, then inked over the top, the orange triangle and the ball and that blocky New York lettering, the kind of thing that looks simple until you are three attempts deep and quietly furious. I redrew the court itself three or four times before it sat right. I wanted the MSG geometry exactly correct, because anyone who’s been knows the place has a distinct shape, and getting it wrong is the kind of thing that gets you destroyed in the comments by a man named GaryKNIX69.

I worked from a reference, a real seat map, the way you’d consult an atlas before pretending to know everything about a country. Then I drew my own, looser, on purpose, so nothing looked too rigid.

The copy edits came back from proofing. Add the full stops to M.S.G. Make “YOU” all caps. Mind the boss’s boss’s boss apostrophes, which multiply like the bosses themselves. Small things. The kind of polish you don’t notice unless it’s missing, which is precisely the point of it.

And then there was the “you.”

There’s a tiny “you” in the bottom left, the punchline arrow, the you-are-here of the entire gag. And I had to move it up. Not for art. For Instagram. Because Instagram, in its infinite wisdom, parks a little circular bubble icon over the bottom-left corner of any image the moment someone reshares it, and that bubble will cheerfully cover a caption, a punchline, or in my case the single word the whole joke depends on.

No design school on earth prepares you for composing around a social-media app’s UI gremlin. You just learn it the hard way, swearing, at 2am.

A couple of sleepless nights later, I turned it in. It’s on newyorker.com today.

‘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.

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…

It was bad. I knew it was bad roughly half a second after it left my mouth, which is the worst possible moment to know a thing like that, because there’s no getting it back. The table groaned. Emma wrote it down. And that is how I became the only cartoonist on record as having pitched a gag to a room of professional humorists and received, for my trouble, a unanimous groan.

I received a phone call the following day from a fact-checker at the New Yorker asking if there was a ‘loud groan’. I said, “I’ll admit to groans. I don’t know about the volume.

Here’s the thing I didn’t fully understand at the time.

When I got my first invitation to that lunch, it felt like I’d finally landed in New York. Properly landed. The cartoonists I’d grown up admiring were passing me the salt. I was bombing captions in front of legends, which meant I was at the table, and the bombing was the price of the seat.

That lunch doesn’t happen anymore. Neither does the in-person Tuesday pitch meeting. The whole ritual, the armful of cartoons, the magazine-to-magazine trudge, the duck salad and the cheap red and the afternoon dissolving into evening, all of it is gone now, scattered like the cartoonists themselves back to their studios for good.

I’d give a lot for one more bad caption at that table.

Anyway.

‘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.

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“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.

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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.

I found this unbearably endearing. Here’s a man whose work I’d cross a city to see, who’s published everywhere a cartoon can be published, standing in the cathedral of his own art form, chickening out of introducing himself to a fan of his.

We are all, every one of us, the admirer standing outside the door. Even the ones on the other side of it.

At the end, I told Rich the cruellest thing he could have done was turn out to be a disappointment, and he’d let me down by being decent company. He insisted he’s an asshole. “Trust me.” I don’t believe him. I think he’s a pure cartoonist- a man with my same derangement of the brain that lets us have an idea, put it on a page, and make a stranger on the far side of the planet laugh out loud at a man drinking his own bath water.

That’s a rare thing. It’s a hard thing to do well. And it takes time.

Rich Sparks’s Horseshoes and Tardigrades and Other Drawings is available now in the book section at Weekly Humorist, alongside his Apple Snyder calendar, starring a man who sleeps on his sister’s couch. Follow Rich on Instagram and Facebook, and find his band, The Last Afternoons -ten years old this year, power pop bordering on indie pop -over on Bandcamp.

Next on Draw Me Anything: Austin Kleon, with his new book Don’t Call It Art. That’ll be on Thursday, June 11th.

‘til then!
Your pal,

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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.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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,

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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.”

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Myq started comedy properly in 2002, coming up in Boston alongside people like Joe List. He counts 2002 as the beginning, though he first walked into a comedy club in 1999 - a senior in college, twenty-one years old, and there as a musician rather than a comedian, doing bits between songs. His parents were music teachers. He started the violin at four, took up guitar as a teenager, and began writing songs that were, as he put it, “supposed to be funny.” These he brought to the Comedy Studio in Boston.

They booked him for single-digit minute spots over the following three years.

In 2008, he went full-time. In 2010, Last Comic Standing gave him the biggest exposure bump of his career to date. By 2019, he’d recorded AKA, his previous special. And then he began building what would become Rini.

Rini is named after Myq’s partner - Rini being short for Catherine, spelt with a K. The special was originally going to be called Imperfect, styled with a capital P, so that it also read as I’m Perfect. The concept: a man moving from imperfect towards, theoretically, his own perfection. It’s a pun that’s also a philosophical arc, which is very Myq.

Over the years of building it, Rini - the person - became the show.

“A hundred per cent, it’s a love letter,” Myq said. “I say in the show that we have written, you know, to each other, with each other, about each other.”

Myq describes her contributions to his comedy with a gratitude that goes beyond the personal. She has a relationship with logic, with things making sense, with justice and meticulousness, that became, when applied to his material, transformative.

She would watch his show every night in Edinburgh. Take notes. They’d review them the next morning. Initially, Myq’s instinct was to resist. He had jokes that worked. Why take apart something that was working? The risk of losing the magic.

And then Rini said the thing that changed his approach: what if the joke could work and make sense? Wouldn’t that be better? “Logical and funny, logical and funny,” Myq said. “Or laugh for short, L-A-F. That’s just what my brain does naturally. And if I start aiming that...”

The new special he’s just recorded is the latest iteration of this process - Myq with a fully evolved approach, a year of psilocybin experiments behind him, a new structural framework (the alphabet, more on this shortly), and roughly a quarter century of craft underneath it all. He recorded Rini in partnership. He recorded Greene afterwards.

If I had to identify the quality that’s kept me coming back to Myq’s comedy for fifteen years, it’s the word economy. Nothing is wasted. The mechanics of each joke are as tight as a watch movement, and watching him think through the mechanism in real time is one of the genuine pleasures of this conversation.

He invented a word: abwordity. Absurd rhymes with words. So why not put word where absurd is? It’s absurd. “That would be like people’s impression of me,” he said, describing his early work - the jokes that were pure wordplay, pure structural delight, before he started asking himself what he actually wanted to say.

He brought up Eminem, of all people, and it’s the best analogy I’ve heard for this. Some of Eminem’s finest lyrics are about completely trivial things - the technique on display is staggering regardless of the subject. “You don’t have to tell people you’re the best rapper to have them know that you’re the best rapper,” Myq said. “If you just be the best rapper rapping about anything, then you’re the best rapper.”

The application to comedy is precise. The topic is almost beside the point. The craft is the point. Except -and this is where Myq gets interesting- he no longer believes the topic is beside the point. He’s built towards having both.

He has a line in Rini that I keep returning to, and I want to reproduce it exactly because the precision is the joke:

After one show, a woman came up to him and said this had helped her relax and enjoy the rest of the performance differently. Myq received this gratefully. And then, internally: what was she doing before? Sitting there categorising everything? “Jokes and truths, jokes and truths, and not laughing at things because they were truths?” The observation works on two levels at once. As his comedy tends to.

“Every great work of art, every great piece of literature teaches you how to engage with it,” he said later. “Ideally, there’s nothing else like it. There’s very little like Moby Dick. There’s very little like Maria Bamford or Reggie Watts.”

And then the kiwi: no amount of description will tell you what a kiwi tastes like if you’ve never had one. You can get close. You can say it’s a fruit. But you have to taste it. Some comedy works the same way.

There is a George Carlin quote that both Myq and I have essentially archived in our personal database of Things People Get Halfway Right. The first part:

“It’s the comedian’s job to find the line, cross it deliberately, and... “

…and there it ends, in most quotations. Myq described this with barely contained irritation. “The comedian’s job,” he said, paraphrasing Carlin, “is to cross the line, find out where the line is, cross it deliberately…

…and bring the audience with you, and make them glad that you did.”

That’s the second part that nobody says. The second part is the whole argument. Without it, the first part is just a licence for chaos.

Myq was, in the beginning, in the mode most comedians start in: my intention is to bring joy; therefore, the joke is fine. He was also, looking back, wrong - or at least, incomplete.

He talked about going back and listening to his first album, recorded in 2009. There are jokes on it that he still loves. And there are jokes he wouldn’t tell the same way now -not because they’re bad, but because they’re jokes about weighty subjects that he hadn’t yet developed the understanding to treat properly.

“I’m glad that there are jokes that I wouldn’t tell now, because that means that I have grown.”

Todd Glass said it best:  

“You can say whatever you want, but what do you want to say?”

Myq started from a place of precious jokes -holding them close, refusing to examine them. Terrified that taking them apart would break whatever magic was making them work. And then someone (in his case, Rini, with her highlighter) said: What if the magic could survive the examination?

It takes everyone a while. The people who figure it out tend to make better comedy.

Myq has read Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse, and he recommends it with the enthusiasm of a man who cannot stop applying it to everything. The concept: a finite game has rules and an ending - someone wins, loses, or it concludes. An infinite game has no ending. The point of an infinite game is to keep playing. Throwing a frisbee. The winning is the playing.

He makes the case that many things we treat as finite games are, at their best, infinite ones. Comedy, obviously - the craft never ends, the learning never concludes, the game goes on as long as you keep playing. But also: relationships.

“The relationship escalator,” he said. “You start dating, you’re going steady, you maybe move in, maybe you get engaged, then you get married. And it seems like a wedding is the end of the finite game of dating. Which, in some sense, maybe it is.”

But the wedding is just a point. The relationship is the infinite game. He and Rini have been together since 2016. They’re not married. He says this as someone who has concluded that the game continues regardless -the ongoing choice, the continuing construction of something without an end condition.

Colin Quinn said something once, at a keynote at the Montreal Just for Laughs festival, that Myq quoted:

“Once you’ve been doing comedy for five years, just know you don’t really know what you’re doing until ten. And for comedians who’ve been doing it ten years... It’s actually fifteen.”

“As long as it’s an infinite game,” Myq said. “As long as you want to keep playing it, you can keep playing.” He has been playing for twenty-five years. He does not appear to be close to stopping.

Then there’s Mario.

My sister found the warp zone. You know the one -at the start of a level, you jump in a specific spot, skip the whole game, emerge at the very end, rescue the princess, fireworks, music, done. The very first thing I wanted to do, the moment the credits rolled, was go back and play my favourite levels.

Thich Nhat Hanh, he says - and he delivers it with the timing of a punchline, which is exactly right: There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.

Become implies a destination. Be implies a practice. The whole game is there, in the verb.

He and his best friend Zach Sherwin -a comedian and rapper you should look up immediately- have developed a concept together around the New Yorker cartoon of the person climbing the mountain to ask the wise person at the summit the answers to life. (Myq mentioned his favourite: Bob Eckstein’s Rubik’s Cube cartoon…

Their conclusion: the wise person at the top of the mountain is your future self.

“I don’t know what’s going to be happening on June 5th,” Myq said. “Well, the me of June 6th is the wise person to ask that question to. He knows exactly what happened on June 5th, if he remembers.”

This landed as both a joke and one of the more practically useful things I’ve heard in years.

This brought us to Buddhism, which brought us to the second arrow.

The second arrow is a teaching that Myq encountered through Joseph Goldstein, one of his (and my) favourite Buddhist teachers. The first arrow is the thing that happens to you - the pain, the loss, the difficulty, unavoidable to varying degrees. The second arrow is what you do to yourself about the first arrow. The suffering you layer on top of the pain. The story you tell yourself. The resistance you mount.

“Pain is mandatory, suffering is optional,” Myq said, attributing this to the Buddhist framing around the second arrow. “Life is full of second, third, fourth - up to an infinite game of infinite arrows,” Myq said.

He also wrote a song about this, which he delivered in its entirety: “Pain means you’re alive, death means you’re not in pain. So the only thing to fear is hell, but hell’s not real, so we’re all set. And now we can just start murdering.”

He noted this was the whole song. Buddhists may hold their letters.

I want to be careful here, because Myq was careful here…

He has been doing ayahuasca for approximately twelve years. I experimented with psilocybin from 2023 through 2025, specifically in relation to how it affected my perception, writing, and comedy. Myq has been building, alongside all of his experimentation, a serious relationship with meditation and Buddhist teaching.

He went through what he calls, with genuine affection for his past self and equal affection for the absurdity of the phrase, “a missionary for mushrooms” phase. “I was like, oh wow, they’ve provided me such value,” he said. And then, gradually: “different people have different life experiences, different people have different brain chemistries.”

He made an argument I found genuinely interesting: “Any substance alters the mind. Like hunger is a state of mind. That is altered by eating food. Any food is literally a mind-altering substance.” He said this not to diminish what psychedelics are but to point out the continuity - consciousness is always being altered by something, and the questions are which alterations we choose, which teach us something, and which are available to whom.

His ayahuasca guide would say: “The effects come and the effects go.” While you’re in the throes of the experience, it might seem like it will never end. It will end. Every mental state you have ever been in, every thought you have ever had: none of them is happening right now.

This struck me as the most useful thing anyone has said about anything.

“My biggest struggle during a positive mushroom trip,” Myq said, “is often that I’m having such a meaningful, enjoyable, fulfilling, satisfying time that I’m like: ooh, I also want to remember some of these things for the future. And the conflict becomes: do I step out of the moment for a moment?”

The clouds come and go, as meditation puts it. You can never become happy. You can only be happy. The me of June 6th will know exactly what happened on June 5th.

And about where he is now, having been changed by all of it -by Rini, by the years of craft, by the Buddhism, by the psychedelics, by the endless chipping at the marble:

“I’m still “me”, you know, in the way that the conventional self, as the Buddhists would say, continues to exist. I am still me. But I am, I think, better. I am changed. I am kinder. I am trying to be. I’m working. I’m thinking about it more.”

And then we ran out of time.

The recording cut off before we were done…

I’m going to be honest: I’d completely lost track of time. We both had. We were somewhere in the middle of a thread about Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone -which Myq and Rini listened to on a road trip- and then the session simply ended. The app closed itself out. Myq and I were still talking.

I’m not sorry about it. You can plan a conversation, or you can have a conversation; with Myq, you have one, and it goes where it goes, and where it went was somewhere I didn’t expect, and I am still thinking about it.

That’s the thing about watching someone who has spent over two decades getting very good at something, and who has also spent the last decade thinking seriously about why they do it and how it connects to a life worth living. The conversation doesn’t feel like an interview. It feels like the kind of talk you have at two in the morning when the bar has emptied out, and neither of you is ready to go home yet.

I’ll have him back. We clearly didn’t finish.

Go to YouTube and search Myq Kaplan. Watch Rini first, on your laptop or your TV, with your full attention, phone face down. Watch AKA. Subscribe to his Substack. Go see him live in New York if you can.

The experience of Myq Kaplan in a room is categorically different from the experience of Myq Kaplan through a screen. I say this as someone who learned the hard way, through my nose, in 2011 at Kabin.

Some lessons stay with 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.

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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,

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.