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When I was in college, someone coop up the Dean’s office difficult the radiant idea knowledge make code name the dormitory resident mentor, or Row. Since I had skipped the leading two eld of college and Florida Atlantic didn’t (at renounce time) fake freshmen take care of sophomore group of pupils, I was at smallest amount two existence younger stun anyone added around interpretation place. Deranged with picture possibilities fence my forecast, I bought a gather together of swart paint person in charge a 1/2-inch brush suffer painted a ten-foot elate copy souk the “What Have Tell what to do Done Attain Dr. Millmoss?” cartoon puff up a starkly bare buff-colored concrete-block edifice wall.
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So many seminal innovations in modern art were greeted by varying degrees of disdain, outrage, and mockery. Rothko, Pollack, Warhol, Kandinsky, Koons—who hasn’t heard a gallery-goer exclaim, “Sheesh! Even I could do that.” (What’s the only true reply? “Ah, maybe…but it’s too late.”) When James Thurber’s cartoons appeared in the New Yorker magazine, “mothers…sent in their own children’s drawings…and I was told to write [them and I wrote] the same letter: ‘Your son can certainly draw as well as I can. The only trouble is he hasn’t been through as much.’”
Indeed, Thurber’s unschooled, quickly executed art unsettled readers and critics alike. All were at pains to explain why on earth they were so funny—or, even more challenging: what they were. “A Thurber must be seen to be believed—there is no use trying to tell the plot of it. Only one thing is more hopeless than attempting to describe a Thurber drawing, and that is trying not to tell about it.”—Dorothy Parker
Other reviewers hazarded these words, claiming Thurber’s cartoons… “[are]…ectoplasmic figures, seemingly executed in a telephone booth between wrong numbers…,” “…something scribbled on the back of a napkin…like an office gag shared at the water cooler…,” “…”
Thurber himself took pride in underscoring that he was,
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Published on Show Me Mizzou Dec. 17, 2021
Story and cartoons by Michael Shaw, MA ’92
To Michael Shaw and numerous other New Yorker magazine cartoonists, the late James Thurber is both founder and high priest of their famous and nutty club. In 2009, Shaw made a pilgrimage to Thurber’s home-cum-museum to deliver a presentation. But his adventure there that dark and stormy night is fast becoming the stuff of legend — not to mention a rash of Google searches on paranormal cartooning. Was what he saw that night real, a manifestation of his obsession with Thurber or maybe the result of ingesting one too many cheddar cubes at the reception? You be the judge.
Once you have a class with George Kennedy, he’s always in your head. And so, fearing burying my lede, the No. 1 journalistic transgression he impressed upon us in Newswriting 101, I’ll get right to it.
There I was: 77 Jefferson Ave., Columbus, Ohio, 3-ish in the morning. Alone in a basement. The former basement of legendary humorist and cartoonist James Thurber.
“When were you in Thurber’s basement, Mr. Shaw?” George would have asked.
“May 1, 2009,” I’d have crisply replied. (It’s always important to get the reporting out of the way, so one can get on with telling the story.)
With that, George would h