The obvious answer

Plus a short essay on the life of a cartoonist....

Today let’s start with an off-color story about being a cartoonist. Can’t remember who said it first, but when some cartoonist was asked about his job he said it was like screwing a nymphomaniac: the first 10,000 times are great.

(BTW: If you’re looking for politically correct humor, you’re clearly shopping in the wrong store. Life is tough; wear a helmet.)

Anyway…here’s what the guy was referring to:

Let’s say you’re a cartoonist and you’re responsible for creating five cartoons a week. Two weeks off for vacation (I never took all my vacation time because I didn’t want to prove that my employers could live without me) so now that’s 250 cartoons a year.

But wait, there’s more.

Early on, I discovered editors were going to edit no matter what; they wanted to prove you couldn’t live without them so I learned to give them something to edit.

Show them one cartoon idea and  they’d screw around with it and rarely if ever make it better; show them three cartoon ideas, let them pick one and they’d feel like they’d done their editing job and be less likely to screw around with the idea they picked.

If you’re continuing to do the math, we’re now up to 750 cartoon ideas a year. Keep that up for 40 years and you’ll need 30,000 cartoon ideas.

People would ask what I did when I couldn’t come up with a cartoon idea and my answer was a bad cartoon. Cartoonists have to draw no matter what, that’s part of the gig.

That being the case, cartoonists are always looking for cartoon ideas and once in a while one falls out of the sky and hits you in the head, which is what happened yesterday.

As you may or may not recall, I wrote about Donald Trump complaining that he’d been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln which struck me as funny because – as I wrote 24 hours ago – of “the whole John Wilkes Booth thing.”

Didn’t take me long to shift from “writer-mode” to “cartoonist-mode” and realize I had a cartoon idea on my hands and today you see the result.

OK, that’s it for today.

I’m now going out for a walk and hope another idea falls out of the sky and hits me in the head and just in case the idea is politically incorrect, I might wear a helmet.

Stay safe, everybody.