Comic Archetypes

By Stefan Kanfer

THE NEW YORKER ALBUM OF DRAWINGS

1925-1975

Unpaged. Viking. $15.

A New Yorker cartoon is a rectangle entirely surrounded by laughter. In the fiftieth anniversary collection, the occupants of those rectangles gather like relatives at a spirited family reunion.

Here are Peter Arno's ageless chorines and satyrs; Helen Hokinson's gaggle of club women; Saul Steinberg's pun-and-ink illuminations; the Thurber people who always reminded Dorothy Parker of unbaked cookies. Here, too, is the ir repressible new generation of arche types: George Booth's slatternly couples--obviously the illegitimate descendants of George Price's cluttered screwballs; Lee Lorenz' literate animals, minerals and vegetables; and Ed Koren's celebrated shaggy people stories.

As individual as signatures, as pertinent and unpredictable as the eleven o'clock news, these miniatures have steadily grown from genre to art form.

But through five decades, they have never neglected their primary obligation: to nourish the comic spirit, to make the risible visible in times of war and economic distress and social chaos. As this warm, hilarious collection demonstrates, despite the changing boundaries of artistic license and comic liberty, The New Yorker cartoonist has always known exactly where to draw the line.

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