Drawing Badly
Some time last week, there was an particularly awkward New Yorker live stream through the magazine's Facebook page. Now, this is a pretty awkward set-up to begin with. Live streaming is tricky, and it's inevitably clumsier than edited productions. Empty pauses linger much longer than is comfortable, and every bad or mistimed joke falls flat before the viewer. The effect is compounded in these New Yorker videos, where both hosts and guests tend to be closer to sponges than to MLK on the charisma scale. They are writers, after all. So how do you get more awkward than a magazine writer in front of a camera, live streaming out into the ether? Swap them out for cartoonists (don't feel obligated to watch):
Pretty awkward, right? There's something vaguely bird-ish about the two of them, though Stokes is probably more of an owl, and Finck whatever kind of bird Woodstock is.
Awkwardness is a byproduct of weirdness, and you definitely need to be at least a little weird to be a cartoonist for The New Yorker. To be driven to any sort of creative career when the likelihood of achieving prosperity is so low[1] requires, if not straight up insanity, a certain degree of non-normalcy. Next (and most importantly), you need to be funny. This much should be obvious. A cartoon can be funny in various ways, and it's been talked about at length before, so I won't bore you with it now.
Anyway, while a successful cartoonist must be 1) weird, and 2) funny, one thing that doesn't appear to be necessary is any extraordinary ability to draw. At least that's the main thing I took away from the New Yorker video stream. To give you a better taste of Liana's work, here are a few of my favourites:
Ehhh, maybe #3 wasn't even technically a cartoon. But it struck a cord, as does most of Finck's work. They aren't technical or beautiful drawings, but they portray feelings of doubt and insecurity that I think are fairly common throughout the Millennial generation. Remember that old formula, "humour = tragedy + time"? There's an inverse relation between the addends. Because the Millennial tragedy is, at the end of it, a problem that comes from the privilege of having options, on the tragic scale it ranks pretty low. So even though we're living out our existential crises right now, we can still laugh at the cartoons (and ourselves).
Going through Finck's work can be dangerous, though. You see the cartoons and think, "Hey, I have ideas! I'm funny! I can draw at a basic level! I should do this!" And then you waste the rest of your day, ink, and paper on scratchy little doodles that end up in the recycling bin.
[1] Turns out that, in 2005, at least, cartoonists made about $675 per cartoon.