The cartoonist J. B.
Handelsman—John Bernard at birth, and Bud thereafter—died last week, at
the age of eighty-five, leaving a legacy of nearly a thousand New Yorker
cartoons (and five covers), published between 1961 and last fall. The
legacy has as much to do with writing as it does with drawing—Handelsman
may be better known for his captions than for the cartoons. (He also
published three humor pieces that incorporated drawings, and, in Punch,
for eleven years he wrote a regular illustrated feature called “Freaky
Fables.”) He wasn’t a polemicist, but his work was concerned with
politics and history and the range of our folly, from mere foibles to
gross inhumanity. “Sometimes something historical gives you a better
perspective,” he said in a 1980 interview. “You can see the latest
dumbness as just the end of a long line of dumbnesses that have been
taking place for thousands of years.” He saw not just the passing
parade—though he did keep a sharp eye on that, believing, as he did,
that cartooning was a form of journalism—but the deep, timeless politics
that color, if not define, human relations (think bosses and
secretaries, generals and underlings, senators and constituents, wives
and husbands, judges and defendants). That’s not to say that he didn’t
appreciate nonsense, or wasn’t up to the minute: in a drawing from 1995,
a little girl comes home and reports to her parents, “I lost the
spelling bee on the word ‘gangsta.’ ” But a Handelsman caption was more
likely to refer to Schopenhauer, Zeus, Romulus, Rousseau, Epithemius,
Dickens, or the Constitution. And still be funny. He was angry about
many things, unfairness and hypocrisy being very near the top of the
list. In a cartoon from fifteen years ago, Handelsman drew the Statue of
Liberty lifting her torch in one hand and holding a portable phone with
the other. Into the phone she says, skeptically, “Well, it all depends.
Where are these huddled masses coming from?” ♦
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