沒有不能開的玩笑:《紐約客》漫畫家談幽默

When Bob Mankoff announced last week that he was stepping down as cartoon editor of The New Yorker after 20 years, some people reached for the obvious, if not necessarily New Yorker-worthy, jokes.

在《紐約客》擔任漫畫編輯達20年的鮑勃·曼科夫(Bob Mankoff)於上週宣佈離職，一些人就此開了幾個淺顯的玩笑，雖然不見得夠得上《紐約客》的水準。

“Huge news for refrigerators everywhere,” one blogger wrote. Other fans hailed a “last laugh.”

一個博客上寫道：“這對所有冰箱來說都是大新聞”。還有一些粉絲歡呼“笑到了最後”。

But while Mr. Mankoff, 72, may be leaving the magazine, he’s hardly retiring. He will be teaching a course about humor and communication at Fordham University. He’ll continue to consult on the Cartoon Bank, a licensing platform he founded in 1992. He’ll also be working on Botnik Studios, a company he’s creating with the comedy writer Jamie Brew that explores using artificial intelligence to augment creativity. (Mr. Mankoff, a former graduate student in experimental psychology, has already collaborated with a Microsoft researcher on an algorithm that can sort through the flood of entries to the magazine’s weekly cartoon caption contest.)

但是，就算離開這家雜誌，72歲的曼科夫也不會退休。他將在福特漢姆大學(Fordham University)教授一門關於幽默和溝通的課程；並繼續爲他於1992年成立的授權平臺“卡通銀行”(Cartoon Bank)提供諮詢；他還將爲波特尼克工作室(Botnik Studios)工作，那是他與喜劇作家傑米·布魯(Jamie Brew)一起創建的公司，旨在探索使用人工智能來增進創造力（曼科夫曾是實驗心理學研究生，與微軟一位研究員合作開發過一個算法，對《紐約客》每週報名參加卡通圖注大賽的海量參賽作品進行分類）。

And of course Mr. Mankoff — the de-facto star of the 2015 documentary “Very Semi-Serious: A Partially Thorough Portrait of New Yorker Cartoonists” — will be contributing to the magazine, though he’s already bracing himself for brutal competition from the many younger cartoonists he has mentored.

在2015年的紀錄片《非常半嚴肅：<紐約客>漫畫家部分全面的肖像》(Very Semi-Serious: A Partially Thorough Portrait of New Yorker Cartoonists)中，曼科夫是實際上的主角，當然，他仍然會爲這本雜誌供稿，儘管他正準備迎接大量來自他指導過的年輕漫畫家們的殘酷競爭。

“I’ve gotten some very nice emails from some of them saying, ‘Now that you’re submitting, you are my mortal enemy,’” Mr. Mankoff said in a telephone interview. “I think I might have to steal all the ideas that have been sent to me over the years.”

“我收到一些很甜的電郵，其中有人說：‘現在你也要投稿了，你就是我的死敵，’”曼科夫在接受電話採訪時說，“我想我可能不得不從多年來寄給我的所有那些點子裏偷點東西。”

He’s kidding, though with him it can sometimes be hard to tell. “My mantra is to leave no joke unjoked,” he said. “I just feel that being funny is being awake.”

他是在開玩笑，雖然有時候他是不是在開玩笑可能很難說。“我的準則就是，沒有什麼玩笑是不能開的，”他說。“我只是覺得保持風趣就是在保持清醒。”

We talked with Mr. Mankoff, who officially departs at the end of April, about some of his favorites from among the hundreds of his own cartoons that have appeared in The New Yorker, “wonky humor theory” and that time he discovered that one of his punch lines had been repurposed on a thong. The excerpts here have been edited and condensed.

曼科夫將在4月底正式離職，我們和他談了他在《紐約客》上發表的數百張卡通中他最心愛的作品、“扭曲幽默理論”(wonky houmor theory)，還有他曾發現自己的笑話被用在丁字褲上。下面是經過編輯的對話節選。

“This is my most famous cartoon, and the punch line has been ripped off on T-shirts, even a thong. That one is a little tricky — why would you have that on a thong? I now own the trademark to the phrase. Initially, the Trademark Office denied it, but I was able to show that my cartoon is actually where this phrase, which has been cited many times, comes from.”

“那是我最著名的卡通，點睛那句話被拿出來用在T恤衫甚至丁字褲上。這個有點難理解——丁字褲上爲什麼要有這種東西？我現在擁有那句話的商標。最初，商標局不承認它，但我能夠證明這個被多次引用的短語確實來自我的漫畫。”

“One of the things you do as a cartoonist is look inside the language. You see a phrase like ‘the language of dance’ and you ask: ‘Is that a real language? Can anyone talk in it?’ One of the interesting things about cartoons is that they are a freeze-frame. Each one has the potential for broader elaboration. You can almost see this one as the premise for an improv skit.”

“作爲漫畫家，把語言剖開來看是你要做的事情之一。你看到‘舞蹈的語言’之類的短語，便會問：‘這是真正的語言嗎？有什麼人能用這種語言交談嗎？’漫畫有個有趣的地方，它們是定格的。每個人都可以對之進行更寬泛的闡述。你幾乎可以把這幅畫看作是即興喜劇小品的前提。”

“This is an idea that comes from just seeing something. The New Yorker used to be on 42nd Street, and we could look out on the Empire State Building, a huge phallic symbolic if there ever was one. It just taps into all our obsessions, or at least men’s obsessions.”

“這幅畫的靈感源於日常所見。《紐約客》以前位於第42街，我們可以望見窗外的帝國大廈(Empire State Building)，就好比一個象徵着陰莖的巨大符號。它只是打動了我們所有人的執念，至少是男人的執念。”

“I did this after that Heaven’s Gate cult [the group involved in a mass suicide in 1997 in California]. That’s what I liked about it — it would appear that week or after, and people would associate it with that. At the same time, it would work on another level and continue to be funny. This one has been reproduced a lot. From my point of view as an atheist, it’s a cartoon about religion. But it can also just be about mindlessly following a leader.”

“我在邪教組織‘天堂之門’(Heaven’s Gate)出事後（該組織牽涉到1997年在加利福尼亞州發生的一場集體自殺事件）畫了這幅作品。這就是我喜歡它的地方——它在事發當週或晚些時候出現，人們會把它和那件事聯繫起來。與此同時，它會在另一個層面產生影響，而且仍然會很有趣。這幅作品被轉載了很多次。在我這個無神論者看來，它是一幅關於宗教的漫畫。但它也可以僅僅是說盲目追隨領袖的問題。”

“A lot of my creativity comes out of my speech. It’s almost like as I’m talking, another editor is working, trying to finish the line. I often start a phrase and then try to flip it or exaggerate it. I’m a little hard of hearing, and sometimes I’ll say to my wife: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,’ and she’ll say, ‘How far back?’ This punch line is an exaggeration, but there’s also a deeper truth relating to how much you actually listen to the person you’re with.”

“我的創造力在很大程度上來自我說的話。差不多就像是我在說話的時候，還有另一個編輯在工作，試圖完成一個句子。我常常是先有了一句話，然後以搞笑的方式說出來或加以誇張。我有一點兒聽力問題，有時會對我妻子說：‘抱歉，我沒聽清你的話，’她會說，‘從哪裏開始沒聽清的？’這個包袱就是一種誇張，但其中也有更深層的真相，那便是你在多大程度上認真傾聽了身邊人說的話。”

“A lot of cartoons take place in very generic settings: two people at dinner, or sitting on the couch. Sometimes I see cartoons that are too well drawn, and I tell the cartoonists to take it back a notch — still draw well, but don’t illustrate, which deadens it. There’s something really nice about the simplicity of cartoons. You don’t want the image to mug too much.”

“很多漫畫描繪的都是很普通的場景：兩個人共進晚餐，或者坐在沙發上。有時我看到一些漫畫畫得過於好了，就會告訴漫畫作者，把它下調一個檔次——畫得還是要好，但不要有太多修飾，否則會沖淡效果。漫畫的簡潔性是非常好的東西，你不會想讓圖片有用力過猛的感覺。”

“This is a really dumb joke that everybody loves. I loved doing this cartoon, but at the same time I thought it was dumb. But then I realized it was dumb to keep thinking it was dumb. One of the things you have to recognize about humor is that at its heart it’s stupid, and we should enjoy that stupidity.”

“這是一個人人都喜歡的非常愚蠢的笑話。我喜歡畫這幅漫畫，同時又覺得它很愚蠢。但我隨即意識到，不停地想着它很愚蠢才愚蠢呢。關於幽默你必須明白一點，在本質上它就是愚蠢的，而我們應該享受這種愚蠢。”