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“I draw to explain the world to myself... and to make us feel less alone.”

That line by fellow New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake was quoted by Liza Donnelly during our chat yesterday, and it pretty much sums up why we do this strange, solitary job where we sit in small rooms and try to make strangers giggle at their phones (or sometimes magazine pages).

Liza is a New Yorker cartoonist, author, and now documentary director. I needed to talk to a cartoonist today. (Mostly because I needed someone to talk me off the ledge before the State of the Union, which she’s live-drawing tonight.) When I asked her how she felt about it, she said, “I’m dreading it, frankly,” which is the only sane response.

But we didn’t just talk about the impending doom of the news cycle. We talked about her incredible new documentary, Women Laughing.

If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when you get the funniest women in New York into a room to draw cartoons and talk shop, this film is it. Liza directed it with Kathleen Hughes, and it is a love letter to the women who scratched and clawed their way into the “old boys’ club” of cartooning at the New Yorker. We’re talking about icons like Roz Chast, Emily Flake, Liana Finck, and Amy Hwang sitting around a table, drawing, and dissecting the “politics of the single panel”.

Liza told me she wanted the film to be about “women’s voices and how cartoons are not necessarily just about a joke, but they’re about the cartoonist’s experience in life”. It traces the history from the very first issue of The New Yorker in 1925 (which featured a cartoonist named Ethel Plummer) all the way to the present day.

We also got dangerously nostalgic about the “lost art of the cartoonist lunch.” Liza’s been contributing to The New Yorker since 1979. Apparently, back in the day, cartoonists like Jack Ziegler and Sam Gross used to actually leave their houses. They would meet on Tuesdays, eat food that wasn’t prepared over a sink, and then go play pool at Tin Pan Alley. As someone whose primary social interaction these days is nodding at my dog, this sounded like a mythical utopia. Liza admitted that while the community is bigger now, we have lost that physical togetherness, which is a tragedy I think we should probably try to fix with more beer.

We wrapped up by talking about AI, mostly so we could agree that it’s terrible. Liza didn’t mince words: “I don’t think AI can replicate what we do in an honest way, because it’s about human experience”. We agreed that robots can’t be funny. My theory is because robots don’t have childhood trauma (yet).

Go watch Women Laughing at your earliest convenience! It’ll be screening on March 9th at the Athena Film Festival, tickets here, March 19th at the Society of Illustrators (with Roz Chast and Emily Flake), tickets here. And March 25th at the Brooklyn History Library, tickets here.

DMA#36: With Special Guest Liza Donnelly

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