471. Pizza on the Fire Escape, Drawing Dogs in the West Village & Stooping in NYC
Plus! An Award Nomination for Ya Boy, The Original Improv, An Epic Post for Tomorrow, & Morris finds the perfect pillow...
Hey again, friend.
Welcome to Issue #471 of New York Cartoons! I have a really big story I’m going to share tomorrow morning with paid subscribers- it’s one of the most fucking ridiculous New York experiences I’ve had in my 12 years living here (Hint: The picture above is from the night in question.) Make sure you sign up to get the full thing in the morning.
I’m writing this out on my phone, sitting on the fire escape of my apartment, scarfing a cheese pizza from Don Giovanni, the restaurant below my place…
I was standing out front waiting for my order when a comedian friend walked past to go to the comedy club next door and said, “You know, that restaurant used to be the very first comedy club in the world, right?”
I blinked. He said, “That’s the old Improv. That’s where everybody started back in the day.”
And that’s why the term “brick wall” comedy club exists. Because Bud Friedman, who started it ostensibly for his wife to have a place to perform, couldn’t afford the sheetrock for the walls, so ended up just leaving the exposed brick. Now every comedy club copies that look.
There’s a plaque on the wall explaining more, as well as a list of all the people who started out here. And here I was just thinking they did great wood-fired pizza.
In case you can’t see them, those scrappy lil’ nobodies are: (The NYC scene isn’t quite the sausage fest it was back then.)
Woody Allen, Sandy Baron, Bobby Baxter, John Belushi, Richard Belzer, Sandra Bernhard, Martin Braverman, David Brenner, Albert Brooks, George Carlin, Dick Cavett, Billy Crystal, Larry David, Rodney Dangerfield, Ron Darian, Redd Foxx, David Frye, Marjorie Gross, Andy Kaufman, Robert Klein, Steve Landesberg, David Letterman, Richard Lewis, Jackie Mason, Larry Miller, Eddie Murphy, Bob Nelson, Joe Piscopo, Mike Preminger, Freddie Prinze, Richard Pryor, Gilda Radner, Joan Rivers, Rita Rudner, Mort Sahl, Lenny Schultz, Ronnie Shakes, David Steinberg, Larry Storch, Red Buttons, Lily Tomlin, Jimmie Walker, Robin Williams and what looks like something Nathan Lane glued on last week. (He’s …not a stand-up comic.)
Ok, now I’m back inside my place because it started raining, and Morris has decided to use my leg as a pillow for the rest of my life. I will be writing from here for the foreseeable. Please send water.
By the way, thank you to anyone who reached out this past couple of weeks to tell me they’ve been enjoying specific things I’m writing. It’s always nice to hear from you. Sometimes I see them in Notes, or in the comments of new and old posts. Either way, I really appreciate them. I got a nice one about my gigs in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, from a couple of weeks ago:
There is a version of the American story that doesn’t make it into the stump speech. It lives in the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 11pm. It smells exactly the way Chatfield describes. It involves a converted conference room in a Holiday Inn Express in New Jersey, a waitress crying in the corner, a man making choices about his pants that cannot be unmade, and a comedian who keeps showing up anyway.
This is the piece. Read it.
Chatfield is an Australian who moved to New York and decided the best way to understand America was to draw it, write it, and occasionally perform in it for rooms that were not always glad he came. That’s not a career strategy. That’s a vocation. The discipline it takes to pull out a sketchbook on a subway after a weekend like that one — after the warm pumpkin martini and the aggressive hecklers and the beautiful unmitigated disaster of the late show — and start drawing the man in the red suit again, is the same discipline that makes anything worth reading.
He describes the Port Authority as possessing “a formidable perfume.” He describes bombing so hard that UNICEF deployed aid workers. He describes Chris Redd digging himself out of an anti-Trump chunk in a room full of Trump voters using Second City improv chops and calling it an absolute magic trick. It was. Anyone who has watched a good comedian work a hostile room knows exactly what that costs and what it looks like when it works.
The man in the red suit is still reading Dune at the end. Of course he is. New York doesn’t resolve. It just continues. So does the work.
I’ve been sitting at the drawing board trying to get work done, but I’m getting nothing done. I can’t imagine why I can’t focus…
He just sits there and judges me for my life choices every moment of the day.
Speaking of dogs, I’ll be drawing YOURS tomorrow with my good pal Beth Spencer from Introvert Drawing Club at noon. Make sure you sign up for her newsletter to find out when/how to tune in.
The Big News: An NCS Nomination!
Amidst all of this running around, we got some massive news. The National Cartoonists Society has officially nominated our book, “You’re Not A Real Dog Owner Until…”, for Best Book Illustration.
For us ink-stained wretches, this is the absolute peak of the mountain. Making a physical book in the modern publishing era is a miracle of logistics, and Scott and I almost watched this project die in the crib multiple times. We are incredibly proud of this, and incredibly thankful to our agent, Nicole, for being a bulldozer when the publishing labyrinth got dark.
Scott and I spent the day posted up at the front of Framebridge in the West Village, armed with a stack of our new books, You’re Not a Real Dog Owner Until..., and a mountain of Blackwing pencils. We weren’t just there to hawk books, though. We were there raising money for Rain or Shine Rescue, an incredible organisation that helps foster dogs and find them forever homes.
We are still doing custom dog sketches directly into the pages of the book. You can order one right now, and we will draw your weird, beautiful, neurotic dog and ship it straight to your door.
WANT TO GET YOUR DOG DRAWN IN THE BOOK? CLICK HERE.
I’m doing a show at The PIT on 29th/Park on Wednesday night. You should come! Here are the details, and the creepy AI-face of mine they put on the flyer…
For Episode #48 of Draw Me Anything, the brilliant Nishant Jain (The Sneaky Artist) came down from Canada. We sat in the loudest, most chaotic intersection on Earth and drew the crowd live. We somehow ended up deep in a conversation about French philosophy, the AI Slop-Machine, and the radical act of paying attention. Watch the full 50-minute replay and read the essay here.
And look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads!
If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $1 per week).
The Sketchbook I’m sharing with you this week is a selection of the sketches I did of peoples’ dogs as gifts this past week at Artists & Fleas in Brooklyn. If you have a friend with a dog, send me a photo and I’ll draw them into the book for you.
If you’re new here, or you haven’t had a moment to wander back through the archives of profound genius I’ve shared up to this point, take a peek at the following scribblings:
