Sketchbook: Overheard at the Comedy Cellar

Eavesdrawing in NYC. First published in the New Yorker (2022)

This was initially published in 2022 when I had about 1900 subscribers, so about 18,000 of you haven’t read it before. Hope it’s ok that I republish it. Makes a good Sunday read.

September 29, 2022
Greenwich Village— New York, NY

The New Yorker has been sending its cartoonists out into New York.

They’ve been instructed to eavesdrop (or as I’ve been calling it, “Eavesdraw”) its inhabitants, and publish their findings in their collection “Overheard in New York”. ¹

I chose the Olive Tree Café, which sits directly on top of the Comedy Cellar like a lid on a pot. It is my favourite place in all of New York, and I say that as a man who has been to the other places.

How to eavesdraw…

You sit. You order the hummus plate, and then more hummus on the side, because two months is a long time to squat at a table you are paying eleven dollars an hour to occupy. Then you open a sketchbook and look, unwaveringly, at absolutely nothing.

And you wait.

The hearing part isn’t the skill. In New York, hearing is not a skill; it’s a condition. Everybody’s conversation is everybody’s conversation. The skill is not reacting, I think. Somebody two feet away says something so perfect as they walk past, so architecturally complete, that a normal human being would laugh out loud, and you have to sit there with a face like a bus shelter and scribble it down before it evaporates.

I got very good at looking bereaved. Unphased.

I should be straight with you about what this actually is. It is theft - pickpocketing words. Every line in that collection belongs to a person who did not know I was there, who was kibbitzing with a friend on a Thursday, and who has now been redrawn with a much worse nose and my signature at the bottom of it. I took the funniest thing they said all year, and I gave them a hat.
(In my defense, they were shouting.)

New York Cartoons is a reader-supported publication. This post is public, so feel free to hand it to somebody who talks too loudly in restaurants.

I have performed at the Comedy Cellar exactly once. (I’m not passed there.)

In 2018, opening for Ronny Chieng. I drew him as Worf from Star Trek afterward to say thank you, which is what I do instead of having emotions. Ronny was kind about it. Ronny is kind about most things, which people find surprising, given that his entire act is a man being detained by his own blood pressure.

So: one set, four years ago, downstairs. And then two months of sitting upstairs at a table four feet from the stairwell, drawing other people’s non sequiturs while the good ones went past me carrying their coats.

Every night, a hundred people come into that place and say something better than they will ever know they said, and it goes nowhere. Somebody has to write it down. The stage takes those who can carry a room. I get the leftovers, which is to say, I get the good stuff, uncut, before anybody has punched it up.

Also, the pen has no two-drink minimum.

(Although I do.)

Anyway. Here is a selection —the rest are available over at The New Yorker…

Yes, that is Outside Steve. If you have ever queued on that footpath in February, you have met him. He is the reason the line moves. He is a friend. He is also, I suspect, load-bearing.

‘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.

1. Not to be confused with the original blog “In Passing” from 2000-2006, or the current version “Overheard in New York” created by Michael Malice and S. Morgan Friedman.