WHAT'S SO FUNNY?

An affectionate, introspective memoir from the acclaimed cartoonist.

Early on in this engaging, pleasure-filled autobiography, Sipress points out that it took decades of pitching the New Yorker before they bought one of his cartoons in 1997. He’s been a regular ever since. In crisp, clean, anecdotal prose, he chronicles his life story, his mischievous cartooning, and the germination of his ideas, with many included for readers to appreciate. “Like most cartoonists I know,” he writes, “the border between my life and my work is flimsy at best.” There’s just enough to sate cartoon fans, but most of the book covers the author’s happy years growing up Jewish in New York City with a loving family, his marriage, and his struggles to make it financially as a cartoonist. “As a kid I loved cartoons,” he writes, especially those in the New Yorker. Jumping ahead, Sipress discusses his conversations with his therapist about his “cartoon brain, which I never shut off, even in the most inappropriate situations, like in yoga class.” Comic timing is crucial in a cartoon; “it lives in the space between the caption and the drawing.” What comes first, image or caption? Either way. When the former, it unfolds just as it will for the reader. The author’s come from his “personal reservoir of thoughts and feelings.” At Williams College, he studied history, which figures prominently in his cartoons, and later Soviet studies at Harvard, but when “funny drawings were spilling over his [notebook] margins, he quit. Sipress secured a job cartooning for the Boston Phoenix but moved back to New York to pursue a brief career as a sculptor, which gave him skills he deploys in his cartoons. Throughout, he traverses the complex dilemma of cartooning amid family deaths and tragedies. When an idea for a cartoon clicks, he gets an “intense physical pleasure that feels like pure joy” and “makes me love what I do.”

This addictive, witty, David Sedaris–esque story is a hoot.