Cartoonist

Pop: A man who thinks he can make it in par.

Johnny: What's an optimist, Pop?

This gag, Greek to the average reader, has a mystic meaning to the New Yorker staff which publishes it once a year. It is a memorial to a type of U.S. humor which The New Yorker helped to bury.

One cartoonist who helped slay the stereotyped two-line gag was a bald, weedy-looking New Jerseyite named George Price, who last month rounded out his tenth year as one of The New Yorker's most delirious funnymen.

Cartoonist Price's first big dent in U.S. humor was made with a New Yorker drawing depicting a man floating near the ceiling over his bed, while his wife remarks casually to a visitor: "He's been up for three weeks now, and there's nothing we can do about it." Since then Price has specialized in a sort of incongruity that borders on surrealism. Key to his humor is the casual gravity with which his long-faced, sprain-skulled characters regard the most highly improbable situations. Drawn with a fast line that gives them the appearance of earnest hysteria, his characters look like ailing vegetables.

So, to a lesser degree, does George Price. He lives in an old 18th-Century Bergen County Dutch house in Tenafly, N.J., which he has filled to the eaves with U.S. antiques, some of them of very dubious authenticity. There, in an attic studio, surrounded by three stripling sons who alternately bawl, play the clarinet and scatter the floor with toy electric train tracks, he works methodically with a crow quill pen because it produces a large variety of thin and thick lines.

Once a week he shaves and drives himself to Manhattan where he dutifully makes the rounds of 57th Street's art galleries. A great admirer of highbrow art, he speaks with reverence of Picasso, Pascin and the abstractionists, curiously dislikes surrealism. Wherever he goes he makes sketches, works them up later into cartoon ideas.

George Price's veneration for highbrow art goes back to his early infancy, when he lived near the late U.S. realist and cowboy painter Pop Hart in Coytesville, N.J. Price never went near an art school. He worked for General Electric as an inspector of soldering, did odd layout jobs in printing offices, finally landed with a poster and theatrical scenery outfit where he painted backdrops for vaudeville houses. In 1927, he went to Paris, spent four months drawing. After he got back to the U.S. he crashed The New Yorker with a $30 cartoon, has been cartooning ever since.

Today, with The New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post, Collier's all clamoring for Price drawings, Cartoonist Price has a hard time keeping up with the demand. He gets $80 and up from The New Yorker. His biggest money comes from advertising accounts (General Electric's "bulbsnatching" series, etc.), which pay him up to $350 each for hundreds of drawings a year.

His grimmest problem is getting gags. Says he: "Good gagmen are rare, and even if you do manage to tie up with a topnotcher, you will find that too much effort must be spent in keeping him sober to make the collaboration a profitable one."

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