Each cartoon needs the right amount of wrong.

Each cartoon needs the right amount of wrong.

People think you get one idea for a cartoon every week, and that's not the way it works. You usually get 10 or 15, and you're - certainly when I was a cartoonist, before I was a cartoon editor, you're rushing to do what is called the batch. When I was doing that, I liked to have, in general, about 10 cartoons.

I think The New Yorker's cartoons aren't very political because the people who do the cartoons aren't awfully political people, and they aren't paid to be political. I think editorial cartoonists are. That's what they do. They probably have a great natural interest in politics, and then they are paid to do it, so they sort of have to hunt out these ideas. I admire editorial cartoons, but I'm also sort of happy that I don't do them because I'd hate to have to label things and I'd especially hate, more than anything, to label something Dennis Hastert or Mark Foley.

I know everybody wants humor to be subversive and speak truth to power. I don't think power's been listening, incidentally.

There's all kinds of theories among the cartoonists: start with funniest, end with funniest.

Humor is basically a cognitive process. And it's a creative process not only on the part of the cartoonist but on the part of the viewer.