While the cartoonists at The New Yorker have had a variety of different trajectories, there is a (rather odd) commonality that connects nearly all of them.
In addition to having fathers who were more than skeptical about their dream career paths, almost all of the artists had tense relationships with their moms when they were kids, filmmaker Leah Wolchok told HuffPost Live's Josh Zepps on Monday.
"Everyone talked about their mothers," she laughed. "Aside from Liana Fink, who seems to have a very healthy, thriving relationship with her mom and was inspired by her as an artist, I would say a lot of the cartoonists talk about the conflict they have with their mom growing up."
Wolchok, who chronicled some of the publication's illustrators for her HBO documentary, "Very Semi-Serious," said the cartoonists also described a sense of loneliness and alienation at school, and quite a few remembered being "the smallest one who wasn't getting chosen for the baseball team."
But cartoonist Mort Gerberg assured that being passed over for the team in grade school had no bearing on his prospects for athletic success in the long run.
"The wonderful irony of that is for the past 10, 12, 15 years, I've been pitching for the softball team of The New Yorker. That's my thing!" he said.
Watch the full HuffPost Live conversation with the cartoonists.
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