Mankoff (left) with history graduate student Eric LaForest. Photograph: Frank Curran

Standing before a movie screen in darkened Devlin 101, the New Yorker‘s cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff, scanned his audience before affixing his gaze on the ceiling. “If I can prevent just one person from becoming a doctor,” he said righteously, trailing off as students and professors erupted in laughter.

For 30 years, Mankoff’s irreverent humor has appeared regularly in the magazine’s pages, and he has been cartoon editor for the past 10. His creations, inked in a signature style of hatch marks, dashes, and dots, often pair the vicissitudes of daily life with blunt, unexpected captions: In one, a husband replies to his nattering wife, “I’m sorry dear. I wasn’t listening. Could you repeat what you’ve said since we’ve been married?” In another, a business executive on the telephone answers calmly, “No, Thursday’s out. How about never—is never good for you?”

On an unseasonably warm evening in October, Mankoff, a slim, birdlike man with a feathery gray shag haircut, arrived on campus to share his take on humor. He had visited once before; last year, his longtime friend Paul Lewis, a professor of English, had invited him to his “EN 543.01: Humor” class (an “experimental course,” Lewis wrote in the course catalogue, “that boldly goes . . . from the study of humor to its creation”). This year, Mankoff returned to the University as a Lowell Humanities Series lecturer.

Lewis, whose own studies focus on humor in American literature and society, recounted Mankoff’s accomplishments for the crowd: In addition to his work at the magazine, Mankoff serves as an advisor to a humor research study at the University of Michigan, and is the founding president of the Cartoon Bank, a commercial database of more than 85,000 cartoons, including every pane published in the New Yorker.

As the lights dimmed, Mankoff promised a show-and-tell of sorts; for the next hour, he’d scroll through a PowerPoint presentation of his favorite cartoons, (as well as a few other random visuals—”this is me looking at cartoons I’m rejecting,” he said of a photo taken at the New Yorker office). Among those that made the cut: a pet owner exhorting his cat to “Never, ever think outside the box”; and Albert Einstein in bed explaining to a dissatisfied woman, “To you it was fast.”

“Good cartoons are funny,” said Mankoff, obviously delighting in the audience’s amusement, “but they also communicate ideas.” An intellectual element isn’t necessary for laughter—”America’s Funniest Home Videos is just people falling down,” he observed. But good cartoons provide a “got-it” moment where “you have to put it together.” On the screen, a drawing of a “French Army Knife” appeared (all corkscrews), and Mankoff paused for a beat as the cartoon made his point.

Mankoff went on to discuss rejection (it happens, a lot, and it’s good for you), the evolution of humor (it’s much crueler now than it used to be), and why cruelty isn’t necessarily bad (“humor deals in stereotypes, generalities, and flaws” by its nature, he said. Behind him on the screen, a cartoon gallows appeared, its platform outfitted with a handicap ramp).

During a Q&A session, students and professors alike asked about Mankoff’s life as a cartoonist: “Have you ever done other comedy writing,” Tony Payne ’08, a member of the campus comedy group Asinine, wanted to know. “Does the caption come before the cartoon,” inquired John Williamson, a sociology professor; Beth Wallace, an English professor, asked how New Yorker cartoons translated outside New York. “To some extent, all humor is local,” answered Mankoff, but as a “way of containing anxiety and pain,” humor is universal. This was his central message, he said, and he reminded the audience of a cartoon he’d shown earlier: a female praying mantis confronting her headless husband in a panel captioned, “You slept with her, didn’t you?” Like parachutists jumping from a plane, said Mankoff, “humor dives into the teeth of fear.”

Read more by Cara Feinberg