Enough laughs to choke a horse
There's an old Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel in which the detectives interview a professional cartoonist. Besides answering their questions relevant to the case, he keeps holding up samples of his work and asking, "Is this funny? What about this one?" He'd been drawing gags for so long that he'd burnt out his sense of humor and had to rely on random strangers to tell him what worked.
If you'd like to inflict that fate on someone on your gift list, the New Yorker has made it easy: The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker contains 656 pages of cartoons in a volume larger than an unabridged dictionary, plus two CDs with all 68,647 cartoons the magazine published in its 80-year history. If that wouldn't permanently damage the funny bone, I don't know what would.
And still -- I crave a copy.
In other cartoon news, the New Yorker is running its annual caption contest. In previous years a failure of imagination has kept me from coming up with an entry. This year there's a caption so obvious I'm embarassed to say it. The cartoon (currently a broken link on the New Yorker site) depicts a sushi bar staffed by a human-sized squid. Another sushi chef is explaining the situation to a suprised patron. My simpleminded caption: "It takes one to know one."
You know, if I had those CDs I could look up the other 257 New Yorker cartoons which must have already used that line.