Bob Mankoff

Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker and founder of The Cartoon Bank.

He edited The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker (Black Dog & Leventhal), the best-selling coffee table book, featuring all 68,647 cartoons ever published in The New Yorker since its debut in 1925. He describes this as the “golden age of humor,” where humor helps build personal connections in business and personal relationships.

Mankoff has edited dozens of cartoon books, published four of his own, and is an accomplished cartoonist. In fact, more than 900 of his cartoons have been published in The New Yorker over the past 20 years, including the best-selling New Yorker cartoon of all time (the harried businessman at his desk with a phone to his ear, reviewing his calendar and saying: “No, Thursday’s out, how about never. Is never good for you?”) He is the author of The Naked Cartoonist, a book published in 2003 on the creative process behind developing magazine-style cartoons.

He has embarked on a three-year partnership with the University of Michigan to conduct a wide range of social science experiments to understand better the role of humor in such areas as psychology, economics and sociology.

Mankoff has enriched the creative brain-trust by recruiting a new generation of younger artists to share the burden of hilarity with the ever-popular veteran cartoonists.

He is a successful entrepreneur: In 1991, he took out a small business loan and started The Cartoon Bank, a business devoted to licensing cartoons for use in newsletters, textbooks, magazines and other media. The Cartoon Bank initially licensed material that was not published by The New Yorker. In 1997, The New Yorker purchased The Cartoon Bank from Mankoff, giving The Cartoon Bank access to all cartoons published in the magazine over the past eight decades. That same year, Mankoff was named cartoon editor of The New Yorker.

Mankoff graduated from Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences in 1966, then entered the doctoral program at City University of New York to pursue a degree in experimental psychology. At age 30, just short of completing his dissertation, Mankoff decided to use his know-how in a new way: as a cartoonist.

In 1977, Mankoff spent four months creating hundreds of original cartoons, and then started submitting them to magazines throughout New York City. It took more than a year to break into The New Yorker –- perhaps the most prestigious outlet for a cartoonist -– and within three years became a regular contributor, as he is today.