I think it was around then that she said, “Don’t self-edit.” So, I’ve shown her things that a man shouldn’t have to see, or woman, I’ve shown her some very tasteless sketches. I thought, they’re not going to want to show Hitler, so I did a skinhead, like a Nazi skinhead, and then I cut it out and stuck it over the Hitler on my sketch, and I showed it to Françoise and she said, That’s a funny idea, but wouldn’t it be better if it was Hitler? And I said, you’d let me do that? And I pulled it off. Hitler was my first genocidal maniac that I had on the cover of the New Yorker. I thought, They’re not going to want me to depict Hitler. She just says, “Don’t self-edit.” There were a few times, or a couple of examples… where I did one about The Producers, on Broadway, Mel Brooks’s, The Producers, and my first thought was to have an audience full of laughing people and just Hitler sitting there scowling. KA: Françoise Mouly, your editor at The New Yorker, seems to put the line way out there for you.īB: She doesn’t put it anywhere. Thank god, I’m not in a position of being a risk taker. It must have been frustrating being someone like Coltrane, coming up with crazy things first… and you know it’s good, but no one else does. KA: Because otherwise you would just draw for yourself.īB: And that would be fine, I guess. KA: And it ends up entertaining somebody else. I’m sure writing is the same thing, and I’m sure making music is the same thing. KA: You’d imagine? I guess writing is similar in that way.īB: Please do not compare me to writers.
I’m trying to make myself laugh.īB: Yeah, if I come up with a funny idea, it’s like, Oh boy, this will really make someone laugh.īB: Yeah. KA: When you draw, are you trying to make yourself laugh?īB: Yeah. The 40 or 50 people gathered in my yard were chatting in the early spring sun, and in between drinking my own Pimm’s Cup, I caught a little of the conversation between Barry and Graydon.
That Memorial Day, Barry sat on the granite slab bench sketching Graydon Carter, who was drinking a Pimm’s Cup. It’s where Miller wrote Death of a Salesman.
Miller had built a small writing cottage on the top of a knoll near the house, within eyesight of Barry’s studio. It’s a modest home on the corner of a dirt and a paved road, a little outside of town.
Our town, Barry’s and mine, is a small rural Connecticut town of about 1,200 year-round residents and I am the designated Memorial Day party-giver because the parade ends basically on my front lawn.īarry and his wife Angie had just purchased Arthur Miller’s former house in Roxbury. The second time I ever spoke to renowned New Yorker cartoonist Barry Blitt, whose book Blitt published this week, was at my house, during our annual Memorial Day party, under the Khousa dogwood tree.
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