From tomorrow’s Times:

At this moment, give or take a coffee break, researchers at the University of Michigan are working against time, or at least budget, to figure out how and why that most delightful of adaptive responses, laughter, took its place in the evolutionary pantheon alongside the appendix, opposable thumbs and lip gloss.

And if you think splitting the atom was hard, try cracking a joke and then isolating it into discrete psycholinguistic components. After all, levity, not gravity, holds it together, a reality Robert Mankoff is only too aware of. Mr. Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker (its annual cartoon issue is on the newsstands now), fled a doctoral program in psychology in 1977 to become a cartoonist. Now he is an adviser to the Michigan study, which is scrutinizing minute facets of people’s reactions to the magazine’s cartoons from the last 79 years.

As befits his profoundly comic, comically profound mind-set, Mr. Mankoff has on his desk a statue of comedic inspiration. It is not a plaster bust of Groucho Marx or Shecky Greene but a plastic 12-inch likeness of that evergreen king of comedy, Godzilla. “He reminds me that I’m silly,” Mr. Mankoff said.

“The essence of humor is incongruity,” he said. That explains why Godzilla looks funny rampaging over the papers on his desk; and why Godzilla is so funny rampaging through a pitifully modeled Tokyo in myriad English-dubbed Japanese films with special effects that are barely a patch on the first monster movie: the 1925 dino-epic “The Lost World.” Even the fleeing hordes look like they are laughing.

“Sometimes I put him down on the street just to see how he looks,” Mr. Mankoff said. “Right now I am looking at a Harvard personality test to give to the cartoonists, but I was giving it to Godzilla. Like, No. 25: I have a clear set of goals and work toward them in an orderly fashion. Would he strongly agree or disagree? I think he’d agree. Or No. 36: I often get angry at the way people treat me. I’d say yes.” Continued.

Well, more than one of them do, but here’s one I just noticed (thanks to L.C. for the tip!): What to Wear This Very Second, by cartoonist Emily Richards (that link is to her cartoons from the magazine). Elegant, colorful, genteel yet provocative:

Gentle Readers, let us start now: Be more strange. Dive off the slow barge of weather assessment and dog breed comparisons into deeper waters. Ask strangers startling questions, wear a fake nose to the grocery, do not go gentle into that good night wearing appropriate clothing. We must stop being so boring.

Amen to that. Richards also links to Marshall Hopkins’ blog; he’s another cartoonist at the magazine, and uses the blog to post some striking drawings.

People often ask me, So, so you like everything in The New Yorker? No, I do not. I usually like most of it. But not everything.

You may get another chance, if you go skiiing with captain Bob Mankoff and some of his team at Beaver Creek in January. From the Vail Daily News:

The event, slated for Jan. 6-8, will feature six cartoonists from The New Yorker magazine on a visit to Beaver Creek. The cartoonists are some of the magazine’s best-known, including Harry Bliss, Matt Diffee, Ed Koren, Bob Mankoff, Victoria Roberts and Jack Zeigler.

During the festival, the cartoonists will be on hand to entertain guests with cartoon renderings, host a breakfast, do classes for children, appear at cocktail parties and more. There will also be a captioning contest—similar to the one the magazine runs on its inside back page every week—where people will have the chance to win prizes by suggesting the best caption.

Just don’t let one of those Addams types try to rope you into a game of ski football. You’ll lose.

Memo to Mankoff: I looked for “Downhill Skier” on Cartoonbank, to no a-Vail! All I saw in my search was this Chast tribute to Addams, faithfully transcribed by the “Day-O”-savvy staff since the drawing is so small:

When I was a kid my parents and I used to escape the city and spend the summer up near Cornell University, in upstate New York. “Look! Trees!” “Smell! Fresh air!” A whole contingent of Brooklyn schoolteachers went up there, to take courses and attend lectures—for, as my mother put it, “a certain degree of intellectualism.” This group included a barely five-foot-tall science teacher whose tan and extremely bald head was overflowing with plans of how to get free stuff from corporations… “I told them the pudding didn’t jell and they sent me thirty boxes!” …a goatee, demonic-looking math teacher who was a compulsive punster and his pale, delicate wife with noticeably tiny feet… “Whatsamatter, you can’t see the forest for the cheese?” … a social-studies teacher who wore clothes she designed herself, like the skirt with plastic pockets that held removable snapshots of all her friends… “Millie Davenport is OUT.” …and a Spanish teacher with a dime-size birthmark in the middle of his forehead, as well as countless others. Anyway, on the Cornell campus was a browsing library. When my parents needed a little “intellectualism,” they’d park me in there. “Now, don’t move a muscle till we get back!” “Okey-dokey!” There were no kids’ books whatsoever, but there were tons of cartoon collections. I discovered Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, George Price, Otto Soglow, and many more. But the books I was obsessed with were by Charles Addams: Monster Rally, Black Maria, Homebodies, Night crawlers, Drawn and Quartered…I laughed at everything that I knew I shouldn’t find funny: homicidal spouses; kids building guillotines in their rooms; and all those poor, unfortunate two-headed, three-legged, four-armed people. Wolcott Gibbs, in his introduction to Addams and Evil wrote that Addams’s work “is essentially a denial of all spiritual and physical evolution in the human race.” All in all, I’d have to agree. “Time to go!” “Did you miss us?”

Are images disappearing from the bank? Do you suspect notorious cat burglar Grace Kelly? Is there a rights problem with some of the old cartoons? As Gawker would say, developing.