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December082009

The Importance of Knowing What You're Good At

Filed under: Looked Into   Tagged: , , , ,

Benjamin Chambers writes:

Reading some old hard-copy issues of The New Yorker dating from the 1990s, I ran across the "Postscript" piece by Lee Lorenz on George Price, from the January 30, 1995 issue.

I grew up with Price's angular cartoons and his quirkily dry sense of humor— and since the guy did over 1,200 drawings for the magazine between 1929 and his death, many people alive today can say the same—so I was stunned to learn that "only one [of his cartoons], amazingly, was based on an idea of his own."

What Price was good at was drawing, and so he used punchlines that were supplied for him. It wasn't that uncommon to use gag writers, but I'd guess the frequency with which he did so was, and the way the results do seem to be so of-a-piece, as if the punchlines and the drawings really were the product of a single mind.

It's telling, I think, that the one drawing that was based on his own idea was a sight gag, and didn't have a punchline. It appeared on the cover of the December 25, 1965 issue, and can be seen below. (Click the link at left to find it on The Cartoon Bank; click on the image below to see a larger version.)

Geo-Price_TNY_12-25-65.JPG

The same 1995 issue of TNY that contained the homage to Price also featured David Owen's profile of software entrepreneur and art patron Peter Norton (Norton Utilities, anyone?). I read the profile at the time the issue came out, and for the past 15 years, it has stood out in my memory as an excellent portrait of a bright, highly unusual man. One of the amusing things in the piece:

Nerd tycoons differ from robber barons ... If there had been no such thing as petroleum, John D. Rockefeller would surely have found some other means of becoming stupefyingly wealthy. But if there had been no computers, what would have happened to guys like [Bill] Gates and Norton? Norton suspects that he might have ended up either as "an angry cab-driver with a Ph.D." or as a paper-shuffling minion of some faceless corporation, much as his father was. The fact that big companies were beginning to use computers at the very moment Norton entered the job market was a hugely propitious accident for him— like becoming a teen-ager in the year they invented French-kissing.


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