Eight Duck Salads with Gus Van Sant

A New Yorker Cartoonists' Lunch with one Hollywood's finest directors.

Gus Van Sant listening to Sam Gross explain foreplay (Sketch by me.)

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.

~ ‘Talk of the Town’, The New Yorker, June 30, 2018

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.