Drawing Funny

Cartooning weirdness, where it didn’t matter if my joke made sense or not, reigned supreme.

My first attempts at gag cartoons were made by copying photos from old National Geographics and adding funny speech bubbles, or warping the drawing so it became silly.

Picasso used to ask his students to draw the perfect circle. It can’t be done, of course – a drawing of a perfect circle doesn’t exist, but the point was that your circle would be completely your own will provide an insight into your style

SCHTICK AT IT

—If all else fails, tickle your own fancy

‘I always thought that inspiration is for amateurs—

the rest of us just show up and get to work.’

Chuck Close

I like to take the small things and make them big. And I like to take the big things, like disease and death … and make them small. Because if you take [those big things] seriously you can’t joke about it.”

—Larry David

Sergio Aragonés is the all-time master of the wordless cartoon. He is the Spanish/Mexican guy who did thousands of those little wordless cartoons in the margins and gutters of Mad magazine. I’ve loved his ‘marginals’ since I was nine: so much drama, character and slapstick in just a few centimetres.

The important thing is to zero in on the things that make you angry as you innocently make your way through your very normal life

A puffed-up, unjustifiable belief in my abilities helped my cartoons graduate from happy accidents to things I actively engineered

I discovered that making someone giggle with a badly drawn joke was infinitely more satisfying than getting a pat on the back for a fine drawing of a vase of flowers

I TOOK UP DRAWING in my early twenties to escape the drudgery of teaching English to miserable high school kids in miserable towns on the west coast of Tasmania. After work I would lie forlornly on the couch and draw the curtains (pun!), dreaming of chucking it all in and getting the hell out of that place