Matthew Diffee

One star off for coming after Murderbot. Yes, it's capricious, arbitrary, and unfair. Suck it up. I'm mourning my precious Murderbot's absence...rereads do not count!...until 27 April 2021. But with that out of the way, this collection of stuff that wasn't quite right for The New Yorker, and not infrequently just Not Quite Right, made me guffaw and grin and generally enjoy myself so much that I mostly got out of the megrims and enjoyed my day.


Why would The New Yorker think this Diffee toon show more was too weird to publish? Seems pretty hilarious to me....

The inimitable Roz Chast replied to Diffee's "Infrequently Asked Questions" feature:
What would make a really terrible pizza topping?
Stye ointment.
LOL

I mean, seriously! If this isn't The New Yorker's audience's jam, what is?!


This will offend some of you. I do not care. The New Yorker did, unsurprisingly...but Sipress had the last laugh, he still got them to publish it! Ha!


Harry Bliss's failed submission to The New Yorker made *me* laugh...so why not their subscribers? Hmm?


Well. Need one say more about Leo Cullum? It says a lot about The New Yorker that they *didn't* publish this one.


Mick Stevens...equal opportunity offender. Don't @ me.

There are hundreds more, the awfullest ones even *I* won't put up, but believe me when I tell you that this book cured my Murderbot hangover. You just can not stay mired in gloom when The New Yorker's funny folk are after your laugher. No, I didn't misspell laughter. English doesn't have a word for the thing inside you that makes you laugh. And NO, it's not your sense of humor! People laugh at funerals faGawdSake! (Although I've always found it telling that the word "fun" starts the whole thing off....)

Go forth and smile. show less

This is a collection of cartoons that were rejected from the New Yorker for being too scandalous, for one reason or another. Most of them tend to push the boundaries of what is socially acceptable where ‘naughtiness’ is concerned, but there are some that are perhaps a bit too morbid for the general public.

As a abhorrent heathen and regular reveler in debauchery and all things scandalous, I found this collection to be wonderfully despicable. Whereas I am generally a bashful fellow, who is show more liable to blush considerably at the most innocuously dressed lady, I can’t help but giggle at the upside-down stripper celebrating Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, or the man wearing no pants, his bare bottom mere inches away from the ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service’ sign.

I have one complaint. Each artist was given a questionnaire to fill out, and this was featured before their collection of cartoons were displayed. The problem is that the questionnaire was two pages of text, and the cartoons were often just two full-page drawings. For a collection of rejected cartoons, I spent the vast majority of time reading about the artists themselves, not gazing at rejected cartoons. It did add depth to the book, but a smaller questionnaire and more art per artist would have been preferable, considering that was the reason I picked the book up in the first place. show less

Beautiful, calm colored pencil and wax illustrations set a serene farmyard scene as each animal makes its traditional sound (Cow says "Moo," etc.), but conflict arises when both the sheep and goat say "Baa" and don't want to share. The dog comes up with a reasonable solution, but Sheep and Goat don't want to share, So Sheep says, "Fine. I'll just think of something that no one has ever said." Enter the unique title phrase...but then a little alien in a flying saucer drops down to lay claim show more to it, and explain the concept of "wiffling" (like sharing...but not something the alien has personal experience doing). After the alien's disappearance, the sheep and goat agree to "wiffle baa," but when the frog joins in as a joke, they round on it furiously (my favorite wordless spread).

See also: We Are Definitely Human by X. Fang show less

A thick little book of single-panel cartoons that were deemed unworthy to appear in The New Yorker but still manage to evoke a lot of internal chuckles and -- for me specifically -- five laugh-out loud moments. There is some nudity and a lot of bizarre or bleak humor. Full disclosure: I've never actually read The New Yorker, so I can't tell if these are better or worse, but they mostly worked for me.

More than 50 cartoonists are represented with anywhere between three to eight cartoons show more apiece. Each artist is introduced with a two page profile wherein they provide mostly silly responses to the exact same list of silly questions. That Q&A gets quite a bit repetitive, but over the length of the book it's a little amusing to see how many end up using the same or similar joke to answer and award bonus points for those who manage to do something wholly original working while working within the constraints of the form. Also, challenged with making a drawing from the same set of five random lines, we're given the raw material for a study of facial pareidolia as a large percentage of the cartoonists turn those lines into faces.

FOR REFERENCE:

Contents:

Foreword / Emma Allen
Introduction / Matthew Diffee
10 Possible Reasons Why Cartoons Get Rejected by The New Yorker / Matthew Diffee

The Rejects
• Robert Leighton
• Jack Ziegler
• Roz Chast
• David Sipress
• Felipe Galindo
• Harry Bliss
• Leo Cullum
• Sara Lautman
• Mary Lawton
• Gahan Wilson
• P. C. Vey
• Jason Patterson
• Navied Mahdavian
• Carolita Johnson
• Michael Shaw
• Alex Gregory
• Teresa Burns Parkhurst
• Robert Weber
• Pat Byrnes
• Barbara Smaller
• Rich Sparks
• Drew Dernavich
• Mort Gerberg
• Julia Suits
• Jon Adams
• C. Covert Darbyshire
• Marshall Hopkins
• John O'Brien
• Zachary Kanin
• Emily Flake
• Juan Astasio Soriano
• J. B. Handelsman
• Michael Crawford
• Marisa Acocella Marchetto
• William Haefeli
• Nick Downes
• Ellis Rosen
• Ariel Molvig
• Arnie Levin
• Kim Warp
• Eric Lewis
• Maddie Dai
• Sidney Harris
• J. C. Duffy
• Mike Twohy
• Glen Le Lievre
• Mick Stevens
• Ed Steed
• P. S. Mueller
• Tom Cheney
• Paul Noth
• Lars Kenseth
• Sam Gross
• Christopher Weyant

Acknowledgments
Copyright Information show less