The cartoon is an opportunity to deconstruct funny, as Mankoff does in his blog. He offers a cartoon summary of the Seinfeld episode for those of us who can't remember the pig. In the episode ...

Today, characters of all racial stripes inhabit the funny pages ... who co-founded the International Museum of Cartoon Art and has written and edited more than a dozen books on cartoons.

It's really hard to be funny. It's even harder to be funny and get paid for it. But the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, Bob Mankoff, has made a living making people laugh for decades.