Humorist & Cartoon Editor, Air Mail & The New Yorker (1997-2017)
Bob Mankoff: Biography at a Glance
- For over 40 years, Bob Mankoff has been the driving force of comedy and satire at some of the most honored publications in America, including The New Yorker and Esquire.
- He has devoted his life to discovering just what makes us laugh, and seeks every outlet to do so, from developing The New Yorker’s web presence to integrating it with algorithms and A.I. Mankoff is currently the cartoon editor at the weekly online newsletter Air Mail.
Media
Biography
For over 40 years, Bob Mankoff has been the driving force of comedy and satire at some of the most honored publications in America, including The New Yorker and Esquire. He has devoted his life to discovering just what makes us laugh, and seeks every outlet to do so, from developing The New Yorker’s web presence to integrating it with algorithms and A.I. Mankoff is currently the cartoon editor at the weekly online newsletter Air Mail.
A student of humor and creativity, Mankoff’s presentation largely focus on the creative process, from writing a successful New Yorker cartoon to inspiring creativity in others and enhancing ideas with A.I and big data. With his storied career of editing literally thousands of cartoons, Mankoff brings a hugely entertaining night of laughs, tips to bring humor to the workplace, and the option of participating in a cartoon caption contest.
In 2018, Mankoff launched CartoonCollections.com, a new spin on the Cartoon Bank, the world’s most successful cartoon licensing platform that he founded in 1992. At Cartoon Collections, Bob has brought together cartoons from the New Yorker and previously unavailable cartoons from National Lampoon, Esquire, Playboy, and Barron’s to create the largest cartoon licensing source on the planet.
With comedy writer and developer Jamie Brew, Mankoff runs Botnik Studios, a network of writers, artists, and programmers who create software that augments human creativity with big data analytics.
During his recent stint at Esquire, Mankoff revived the magazine’s legacy of satire and humor, editing humor pieces, providing story ideas, and drafting his own cartoons.
For twenty years as Cartoon Editor for The New Yorker, Mankoff pored over thousands of submissions each week, analyzing, critiquing, and selecting each cartoon. He mentored cartoonists, new and old, toward the laughs readers expect. In 2005, he helped start the “New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.” With 5,000 reader submissions a week and millions of entries to date, Mankoff partnered with Microsoft and Google Deep Mind to develop algorithms to help cull the funniest captions.
Bob is the author of numerous books, including his New York Times bestselling memoir, How About Never – Is Never Good For You?: My Life In Cartoons, of which the Washington Post wrote, “Mankoff's deep understanding of humor, both its power and its practice, is the live wire that crackles through his book.” His upcoming book, Have I Got a Cartoon for You!: The Moment Magazine Book of Jewish Cartoons, will be released October, 2019.
Mankoff’s career started, unexpectedly, by quitting a Ph.D program in experimental psychology at the City University of New York in 1974. Shortly after, he began submitting cartoons to the New Yorker. Three years and over 2,000 cartoons later, he finally made the magazine and has since published over 950 cartoons. His story and day-to-day at the magazine were the focus of the 2015 HBO documentary Very Semi-Serious.
Mankoff has taught classes at Swarthmore, Fordham, and led workshops on the creative process.
Topics
Your Sense of Humor — Don’t Leave Home Without It
As young kids, most of us were taught that humor is silly and a waste of time. And so, while five-year-olds laugh hundreds of times a day, adults are down to about fifteen. We’ll see how wrong this prejudice is and how humor and other forms of play can enhance our professional effectiveness. Humor has three main benefits. First, it’s physically and psychologically healthy, especially in the way it blocks stress. Secondly, humor makes us mentally flexible — able to manage change, take risks, and think creatively. And thirdly, humor serves as a social lubricant, making us more effective in dealing with colleagues and clients. We’ll experience all of these using pictures, cartoons, stories, and exercises.
Mr. Mankoff enjoys customizing his talks on humor and laughter for particular audiences and professions, including:
- Humor and Healthcare
- Humor and Finance
- Humor and the Law
- Humor and Education
- Humor and Leadership
- Humor and Mental Health
- Humor in Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service
Speed Thinking: How Big Data and A.I. Accelerate Creativity
With ClickHole head comedy writer and developer Jamie Brew, Mankoff is developing Botnik Studios: a network of writers, artists, and programmers whose mission is to create software that augments human creativity using big data analytics. “It’s technology as well-informed collaborator,” Mankoff says, “as opposed to a coldly automated content-creator… a person working with a computer, and adding a kind of mastery to it.”
Based on the idea that you can write anything from a country-western song to a Seinfeld episode, the algorithm enables access to the text of all country western songs and all Seinfeld episodes to create completely unique content. “We’re not going to give it over the machines,” Mankoff promises, “You’re not simply spitting it out, you’re modifying it.
While Instagram and Snapchat have enabled users to edit and improve photos with filters, so Botnik has the potential to be a stand-alone tool (such as autocorrect) that users utilize to enhance creativity or humor (e.g. a ‘humor extension’ built into Instagram or Snapchat filters). Mankoff, who studied experimental psychology at university believes that “in the end, machines are idiots, or maybe idiot savants that need humans to create content that’s going to be interesting to humans.”
What's So Funny? How to Inspire Ideas, Imagination & Creativity
As the longtime cartoon editor of The New Yorker, Bob Mankoff has spent his life pursuing that elusive thing called creativity and inspiring it in others. If you’ve ever wondered where great ideas come from, or yearned to channel your creative energies, or just wanted some pointers on how to get those artistic juices flowing — this talk (and his book The Naked Cartoonist) is for you. In this fast-paced and funny multimedia presentation featuring cartoons and videos, Bob shows you the soup-to-nuts process of cartoon creation, giving you not only a detailed look at his own work but that of artists who keep you laughing every week, except, of course, when they don’t, puzzling you with a cartoon that you “don’t get.”
You don’t have to be an aspiring cartoonist to appreciate this talk; Bob’s wisdom and his practical yet whimsical approach to the creative process are designed to benefit anyone who has ever stared at a blank piece of paper or canvas and dreamed of transforming it into something truly original (and maybe even commercial). What’s so funny? Bob Mankoff knows best. He also knows how you can find your own personal voice and message, how you can learn from the masters of the past, how you can transform a current event into a comic tour-de-force…even how you can incorporate telling lies and taking naps into your daily routine — and justify it.
A Passion for Perseverance: If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try 2,000 Times
It’s not easy to get your cartoon published in the New Yorker. Just ask their former Cartoon Editor, Bob Mankoff. Since 1977, his name has been synonymous with the New Yorker, but he didn’t get there overnight—it was actually closer to 1,000 nights. It took three years and 2,000 submissions to see his name in the corner of one of his cartoons. More than talent, getting published took perseverance.
In this talk, Bob Mankoff will show audiences how to stop worrying and love the process of creating. To achieve your goals, you need to be ready for the long haul. But as Bob will explain, the long haul doesn’t have to be a real slog. This fun and interactive program will leave you ready to get to work with a smile on your face.
Funny You Should Ask: How & Why Jews Became “the People of the Joke”
From growing up Jewish in Queens, NY, to going to the Borscht Belt as a kid where he saw performances by Jerry Lewis, Buddy Hackett, and Rodney Dangerfield, among others, Bob shows how his Jewish heritage helped him to become a successful cartoonist and presents a personal and historical cartoon illustrated history of Jewish humor.