Robert Mankoff

I think funny is just the foundation. I don't really think, to some extent, funny is the absolute most important thing. It should also communicate some idea through the medium of cartooning. Just to be funny is... You know what, the things that you laugh hardest at aren't cartoons.

I'm pretty adept with computers and Photoshop for my blog, and I found my style with a conversational voice and an image-ready column.

Humor levels the playing field. I understood that early on - that was something I had.

One question about a joke is, how well is the strangeness of the situation resolved? At 'The New Yorker', we retain a lot of incongruity, tapping the playful part of the mind - Monty Python-type stuff. We also try to use humor as a vehicle for communicating ideas. Not editorial comment, but observation.

There's public humor, and there's private humor, and they're all appropriate in their own way, and you shouldn't - just as you wouldn't have a megaphone and say certain things that you would say around your friends - things that are perfectly all right within your close social group with whom you share a certain context.

The interesting thing about humor is that in humor, you - in logic, something is A or not A. In humor, it's both A and not A.

The line between humor and bad taste is your audience, in which some people will find everything offensive, and some people will find nothing offensive, but the truth is that most humor originates in what would be called bad taste.