The news can be stressful. New Yorker cartoonist Barry Blitt wants you to laugh at it

The Sunday Magazine16:36The New Yorker cartoonist Barry Blitt reflects on the art of finding a laugh

Barry Blitt says it's an uncertain time for editorial cartoonists amid political tensions in the U.S. — but laughter, he says, is the key to dealing with the heavy stuff.

In his three decades as an editorial cartoonist for The New Yorker, the Canadian-American illustrator has contributed over 140 covers to the magazine.

The New Yorker — an American publication featuring journalism, commentary, fiction and satire — turns 100 this year. Along with its written pieces, The New Yorker has become world-renowned for its illustrations and political cartoons.

Support for editorial cartooning has been in decline in recent years, with departures of high-profile cartoonists like The Washington Post's Ann Telnaes and The Halifax Chronicle Herald's Michael de Adder. 

In 2019, The New York Times stopped running editorial cartoons altogether.

Barry Blitt spoke with The Sunday Magazine host Piya Chattopadhyay about the challenges facing editorial cartoonists and how to find humour in the humourless.

Political cartoonists often get their best ideas from the absurdity of politics. You're a Canadian and you're an American — from your point of view as an illustrator, how are you looking at this strange moment between our two countries?

It's impossible to look away; it's like the proverbial train wreck. I don't watch any political TV. I can't stand that even at the best of times. Anytime I read anything online it's really depressing. I'm just filling my sketchbook with anger and absurdity, basically. 

OK, so let's get into that sketchbook. If you were to draw an illustration of this tense relationship right now between Canada and the U.S., what might you create? 

Oh, just lots of angry Trump drawings — Trump being attacked by moose and geese. I'm sort of numb with everything that I'm putting down. I feel a lot of anger and I'm very tempted to move back [to Canada]. I moved [to New York] at the end of 1989. I assume that in Russia a cartoonist can't draw mean drawings of Putin. I don't know if that's going to extend here. It's going to be troubling for someone in my position to draw Trump and his retinue. It is a very uncertain moment for me and for a lot of people.

Three decades is a long time to be drawing cartoons at the top of your game, not just in The New Yorker, but many high profile magazines. When you walk by a newsstand and you see your cover there, what is the feeling you get?

Just to stop you right there — I haven't seen a newsstand in a long time.

When I moved down here, and when I was living in Toronto and Montreal, there were stores filled with magazines. It was very intoxicating for an illustrator to look at all the work that was being published. There were so many places I could still attempt to sell my stuff. That has really dwindled, there are so few magazines left. 

I'm very thankful The New Yorker is doing well and that they publish my stuff. It's thrilling to do a New Yorker cover; I think I've done maybe over 140 of them now. It's still incredibly nerve-wracking to get the call. As far as seeing it after it's published, I invariably regret visual decisions I made. That's the way it always goes. 

So when you sit down to do a cover, what are you thinking about?

I'm just trying to make myself laugh. There are certain topics that I want to reference and come up with good metaphors for. A nice metaphor that gets you to look at a situation in a different way. Basically I'm trying not to inhibit myself too much and just scribbling and riffing off of a situation that's irking or interesting me in some way. Sometimes an idea just hatches and you think "how did that happen?"

You won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for "work that skewers the personalities and policies emanating from the Trump White House with deceptively sweet watercolor style and seemingly gentle caricatures." How have you seen that duality? 

I've described my own graphic style as passive aggressive. I wish I could skewer with a more vengeful pen and harsh caricatures. I just love the caricature work of Steve Broadner, Phillip Burke, or Robert Grossman. There's been a great many caricaturists who are vicious in their graphic style. I attempt that and it just doesn't come out right. It looks like I'm yelling when it's more comfortable for me to suggest it in a moderate voice.

Let's talk about one of your covers that got some backlash. You depicted Barack and Michelle Obama fist bumping — people had a lot of opinions on it. Tell me about what inspired that cartoon and the issues people had with it?

When Senator Barack Obama was first running for president, there was so much innuendo in the air about him, and obviously a lot of it was racist. When Barack and Michelle fist bumped each other they called it a "terrorist fist jab" on Fox News. It seemed like a funny idea to just depict everything they were saying and highlight how absurd it was. So that's what I did. I drew Barack Obama as a secret Muslim and there was innuendo about Michelle being a Black Panther. So I drew all of that — and I drew an American flag in the fireplace. 

A lot of people didn't get the joke and so it was received badly. Jon Stewart on The Daily Show did an editorial about it and said, it's just a cartoon, why are we freaking out about it? And that seemed to bring the temperature down. But the first couple of days when it came out were a little shocking for a passive-aggressive cartoonist like myself.

Many people are having a hard time finding a laugh amid all the seriousness and tension in the world. Why is it important for us to find humor in things that often feel humorless?

It's just one way of dealing with hideous stuff. I'm not a philosopher or psychologist, but the easiest way for me to deal with heavy things is to find a way to laugh at it. It's a way of shrinking something that seems enormous and overwhelming. It's a coping mechanism basically — and a laugh is pure. If someone's laughing at a drawing, it's a reaction to something real.