The HUMOR Project

Born and raised in Painted Post, New York (we're not making this up), John McPherson first began drawing cartoons at age 5, on the dining room wall (we are making this up). Discouraged by the poor reviews these early cartoons received-- and the fact that he was grounded for the next 13 years-- John decided to put his cartooning career on hold until he was 25.

After graduating from Bucknell University in 1983 with a B.S. in mechanical engineering, John worked for seven years as a design engineer. It was during this period that he again took up cartooning, discovering that his drawings looked much the same as t hey did 20 years earlier. Nonetheless, John was able to moonlight his way to a thriving free-lance cartooning career as a regular contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, Campus Life, Yankee, Marriage Partnership, and more than 30 other national magazin es.

Although people laughed a lot at John's engineering drawings, they laughed even harder at his cartoons, and in 1990 he made the totally irresponsible decision to leave his engineering job and leap blindly into the terrifying world of full-time freelancing .

Shortly thereafter, Zondervan Publishing discovered him and published his first two books. An editor at Zondervan sent these books to Universal Press Syndicate... which led them to offer John a contract for international newspaper syndication.

As they say, the rest is hysteria... and the hysterical laughter that John's Close to Home has generated since it started running in newspapers on November 30, 1992. John has built a loyal and enthusiastic following of millions of readers in over 600 new spapers throughout the United States and abroad.

Changing diapers, mowing lawns, preparing meals-- the world of John McPherson's Close to Home is familiar to all. Yet, McPherson presents this world with a particular slant: he shows us the oddities, the idiosyncrasies, and the inconsistencies that make us human and make us laugh. Readers relish his oddball characters embroiled in awkward situations in home and family life. His distinctive style and ability to catch us in the act of being ourselves often hit precariously close to home....

A mother presents her child with a treat from leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner: gravy Popsicles. An exhausted mom on an exercise bike offers her child five dollars "if you'll put eight miles on this thing before your father gets home." A new father o ffers a celery stalk to his coworkers in lieu of a cigar, since "the growing interest in health and fitness has had an effect on even the longest-standing traditions."

John's books include: McPherson's Marriage Album, Life at McPherson High, McPherson on Parenting, McPherson Goes to Work, McPherson's Sports & Fitness Manual, Close to Home, One Step Closer to Home, Dangerously Close to Home, Home: The Final Frontier, High School Isn't Pretty, Close to Home Revisited, and The Honeymoon Is Over (hot off the press). His new children's book, The Barber of Bingo, will be published in March 1997.

John and his wife, Laura, 4-year-old son Peter, and future draft choice (Laura is due in December) reside in Saratoga Springs. When he is not drawing cartoons, John unwinds by trying to expand his extensive collection of bread-wrapper twist-ties. John w ill also unwind at a special autographing session at our April 18-20, 1997 annual international conference in Saratoga Springs.

The cartoons accompanying this interview are reprinted with permission from John McPherson. All cartoons (c) by John McPherson and distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.

Joel Goodman: You and I go back a ways... I looked into my files and came across your letter to me of March 21, 1989, in which you said, "As a cartoonist, I am very interested in all aspects of humor and think it's great that there is an organization that recognizes the importance of humor in everyday life.... Right now, I'm working as a mechanical engineer but plan to quit my job this Summer to go into cartooning full-time."

I had somehow discovered you and your work and liked your cartoons, so I called and got in touch... and you sent me some of your work at that time. It's great for me to be "close to home" with this interview... with you living in Saratoga Springs, this i s the closest-to-home interview I've done for LAUGHING MATTERS. It's been a real treat for me to interview people I admire and respect... and people I know that you admire and respect, too-- like Dave Barry (Vol. 8,

John McPherson: We had dinner with Sparky Schulz a few years ago. PEANUTS was probably my first favorite comic strip when I was seven, eight, nine, and ten.

JG: So, how was it for you to have a chance to meet someone you admired when you were a kid?

JM: I was dumbfounded. We were with another couple and him and his wife. It was really neat to sit down and chat with him. At the end of the dinner, he sort of timidly asked when we were going to be leaving the area. He said, "I wanted to show you my studio... is there any chance you'd be willing to go over there this evening?" It was about 10 o'clock at night... and I said, "Sure!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" It was great to be able to sit behind his drawing table!

JG: Is there anything in particular that you especially appreciate about him and PEANUTS?

JM: I admire his accomplishments and the impact that the PEANUTS characters have had. I'm sure they are the most well-known cartoon characters in the world along with Mickey Mouse. They're everywhere!

JG: Were there other cartoons you enjoyed as a kid that may have planted some seeds for your own comic?

JM: I think I am kind of unique in that I had no idea I was going to be a cartoonist. I had no real interest in cartooning until I was 25. I always enjoyed cartoons... especially single-panel cartoons, because I liked the immediacy of the humor. When I started to think about cartooning as a hobby, people like Gary Larson had an effect along with Gahan Wilson and a lot of freelance cartoonists. I was more inclined to go through magazines looking for single-panel cartoons. That's probably where the seeds of my cartooning were planted.

It was about 1983 when I was in college that I started jotting down cartoon ideas even though I couldn't draw. I got into cartooning more out of a desire to express my sense of humor than out of a desire to draw, because I didn't know how to draw. Actually, what I really wanted to do in my dreams when I was 16 or 17 was to be a humor writer-- doing what Dave Barry was doing.

I dabbled in the writing and could just see that it wasn't going to fly. I didn't know it at the time, but when I started dabbling in cartooning, it was to become the perfect way for me to express my sense of humor. It's living a dream come true.

JM: Mark Twain and James Thurber were the ones who really inspired me to be a humor writer. There are very few modern-day examples of someone writing like Twain... Garrison Keillor is the only one who comes to mind. Dave Barry is completely off the wall, insane humor... Garrison Keillor is a little bit more reality-based, telling a funny story.

JG: Thurber included cartoons and line drawings along with his writing. I wonder if that was any influence on you with him mixing his writing with the drawing.

JM: I was never real nuts about his cartoons. A lot of them were very esoteric. It was more his writing that got to me.

JM: I look back at my cartooning in the past 11 years and see things that I did in the first two or three years that I liked then but now I don't like. When you're doing cartoons-- especially when you're doing it in syndication day in and day out, I think you really need to be amusing yourself. It's simply a matter that some of that stuff doesn't work for me because I did that for awhile, and now that humor doesn't seem as fresh and innovative to me. Probably most people wouldn't notice the difference -- it's just little subtle things along the way.

In the future, I'm probably going to go for stuff with a little more edge to it. I don't want people to refer to my work as "cute" even though I'm doing predominantly family-oriented stuff. I'd be a little more like Roseanne than like Beaver. At the sa me time, I don't want to be do material that offends people. It bothers me when I hear that someone was upset by a cartoon. It's a fine line between being fresh and doing cartoons that have some punch to them and crossing over into offending someone.

It constantly amazes me what will offend people and get them in a rage. I did one where I had a deer standing in a clearing. In the foreground is a hunter hiding behind a tree. On the side of the deer is a nutrition facts label like what you find on a can of soup. I got a letter from a woman saying that never in her life had she been so offended by a cartoon. When are we going to stop viewing animals as sources of food? I'm predominantly vegetarian myself so I can relate to vegetarianism, and I don' t hunt. I'm not advocating going out and shooting deer... I'm merely saying "wouldn't this be fun!" With that cartoon, I was trying to think where it would be fun to have one of those nutrition labels.

JG: It's interesting that you bring up this example, because I just love the back cover of one of your books, Dangerously Close to Home, which has on it this nutrition label... your books certainly provide a lot of food for thought!

JM: I'm trying on the back of my books to put something inane other than the usual dull bio stuff. The front cover and back cover are what people in a bookstore will see first... so I try to get them laughing to get them into the book, instead of "John McPherson was born...."

JG: I'm curious about your own self-concept development. Here's a guy who goes from an interest in humor writing to cartooning when you had never drawn before. How did you make that self-concept leap or breakthrough?

JM: In 1983 and '84, when I was fresh out of college and looking for a job, I started having cartoon ideas pop into my head and began jotting them down. I didn't have any art background and my drawing skills were limited to stick figures, bad ones at th at. Even though I hadn't drawn anything yet, I had this notebook full of 30 ideas. I was thinking of sending them to a cartoonist-- just for the thrill of seeing them on paper-- and then I figured, "What the heck, let me try to draw these." So I just f orced myself to draw. I still have my notebook with my very first cartoon from February 1985, which took me about 8 hours to draw, and looked like the scrawlings of some cave dweller... but I was hooked. Something about it was incredibly fun and I felt compelled to draw more.

JG: It's really quite astounding to see your meteoric rise from pre-stick-figures to being a syndicated cartoonist. How did you decide to go with Universal Press Syndicate?

JM: I was very impressed with their stable of great strips: Calvin & Hobbes, Cathy, For Better or For Worse, Herman, Ziggy, and The Far Side, to name just a few. When I thought about which strips were my favorites, almost all of them were with Univers al and I thought that was an important consideration. I felt it was important to be with a syndicate that seemed to have the same outlook on humor as me.

JG: Since only one out of 5000 are accepted into syndication, that must have been quite a smilestone for you!

JM: That's been the fun of cartooning-- there have been so many milestones along the way. I initially got my first cartoons published in a local bi-weekly newspaper, and getting into that weekly paper at $5 per cartoon was almost as thrilling as getting syndicated. It was great to see my cartoons in print... but even more importantly, the ten bucks a month allowed me to afford cable. I was psyched.

Most of the cartoonists I've met have known that cartooning was what they wanted to do all their lives. I was not that way. And that doesn't mean I love it any less than anybody else... it just took me a while to figure out that this is what I wanted to do.

When I had my first job in an otherwise mind-numbing engineering office, I began work on a weird words calendar. Each morning, a co-worker and I would search for the most bizarre word we could find in our jeep-sized office dictionary. We unearthed such gems as "aboiement" (the compulsive utterance of barking sounds) and "hircinous" (smelling like a goat), and tried to slip them casually into daily conversation and meetings with upper management.

When I was in that job, I drew cartoons for four or five hours every night after work. I couldn't wait to get home, eat dinner and get started. I was really driven, really passionate about cartooning because I loved doing it so much! If I won the lottery, I'd still be doing what I'm doing!

JM: I was known as "the funny guy." The center of attention. The class clown.

JM: Nope, never got in trouble that way, but I do remember making a snide remark in class once in eighth grade, which resulted in everyone getting a pop quiz.

JG: What about your family? I'm always curious to know what kind of family environments breed people like you.

JM: I had a very normal, almost Beaver-Cleaver-type of home with two great parents. My dad and older brother have always been punsters... both pretty funny guys. I'm sure a lot of my humor has come from them and my sister, too.

When you're this close to humor, it's hard not to analyze it. I'm constantly looking for a recipe to my cartoons. For two reasons: (1)I want to find new ways to get good cartoons; (2)I want to avoid repeats-- I want to make sure that my cartoons aren't all falling into the same pattern and getting stale.

JG: If you were to come up with a recipe or ingredients, are there any things over the years-- patterns or trends-- for your cartoons that work for your readers and/or amuse you?

JM: The best cartoon is an idea so bizarre that no one else could have possibly thought of it. On the other hand, if no one can relate to the idea, it's lost. A great cartoon should be wild, but also based on some degree of truth.

My cartoons tend to be very visual. I usually see something calamitous or out of place going on. Then it's a matter of coming up with the caption or specific angle to make the cartoon work. I see a few different categories of cartoons. Some are simply funny because they're inane... I would say that about a lot of The Far Side cartoons, which are just plain funny. They may not necessarily directly relate to something in our lives, but still they're funny.

Then there are other cartoons which I think people laugh at because they bring an "Oh, my wife did that last week!" The title Close to Home (my wife's idea) says that my panel will be about home and family life... but it has a double meaning in that the situations depicted should strike a familiar chord among readers. Ultimately, I want readers to see some aspect of themselves or their family members in my cartoons.

Believe it or not, the thing that seems to make the best topic for cartoons is stressful situations. That could be why I've done cartoons about going to the dentist, things that happen between family members, and all those never-ending home improvements. What makes a cartoon good is that it can take a stressful situation and point out the funny side. The ultimate compliment is for somebody to cut out one of my cartoons and put it on their refrigerator. It means something to them.

If I could do 90% cartoons that people are going to relate to, that's what I would do. That's what Scott Adams is doing so well with DILBERTr. He's become the voice of the downtrodden, and has really found a niche there. Did you see the cover story abo ut him recently in Newsweek? In it, he mentions that his daily affirmation is "Pulitzer Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Pulitzer Prize."

JG: I recently did a presentation for a major R&D corporation in California. As a surprise to the audience, they had Scott Adams come in and give a talk, too. It was a real treat! The Newsweek cover story said that DILBERT was not so much a cartoon as a documentary of corporate America. You and Scott are the next generation of cartoonists... do you have a sense for where the two of you are similar or different?

JM: One big difference is that his is a strip and mine is a single-panel. Most of the time, I'm very glad that I'm doing a single-panel because there's nothing better than the instant bang of a one-second understanding and laughing at a cartoon. But there are other times when I'm very envious of Scott or Bill Amend who does Foxtrot, because they can tell a story and set up a situation and have dialogue going back and forth. They can also convey ongoing personality traits of their characters. I love the woman in DILBERT whose hair is in a triangle-- she's always in charge and savvy and very quick-witted. Scott is able to do that-- to convey a sense of personality. I don't have that luxury in a single-panel. Obviously, the other difference is that h is deals almost exclusively with the working world, while I'm doing a variety of stuff.

JG: When it comes to putting it together, I know you've been asked a million times "Where do the ideas come from?" When I interviewed Cathy Guisewite and Lynn Johnston (see Volume 6,

JM: That is the age-old question that all cartoonists are asked approximately 30 times a day: "How do you get your ideas?!" My answer is usually a resounding "Uhhhh...." The answer is that I'm not really sure how I do get my ideas, they just sort of appear. When I first started out, it seemed like I had more cartoon ideas than time to draw them. I was constantly jotting ideas down that seemed to just pop into my head out of nowhere. But as my sales picked up and demand for my cartoons increased, I found myself needing to make a conscious effort to induce ideas.

The main approach I use is to sit back, relax, and let my mind wander. If I'm trying to get ideas on a particular topic, I'll surround myself with materials related to that topic. For example, when trying to get "high school ideas" for a panel, I'll often sift through my old high school yearbooks and sooner or later the pictures spark some kind of bizarre thought that is suitable for a cartoon idea.

Another thing I'll do is make a list of things or situations related to the topic. If I'm trying to get ideas on home and family life, I'll start jotting down things like "mowing the lawn, doing the dishes, taking hair out of the bathtub drain, leaving the toilet seat up, etc...." I'll make a list like this of 30 or 40 items and then I'll go back and let my mind wander on each topic, trying to envision some funny situation.

Most of the time, I think of the whole concept and I write down a pretty complete cartoon idea. Lately, I've been experimenting with just drawing a goofy picture and seeing what I can come up with. Sometimes I'll just draw some kind of bizarre situation , and then I hand it over to my assistant and say, "Play with some captions." We start laughing and kicking around stupid angles that we could take. My editor loves it when I submit material with lots of options.

JG: As suggested in the title of our annual conference on humor and creativity, we really see humor and creativity as intimately related... the haha-aha connection. In your own work, you are being intentionally divergent by giving your editor choices.

JM: That's when it really becomes fun-- when there are many angles that you could take.

JM: I've got my e-mail address (76702,2263@Compuserve.com) on my cartoons, and receive reactions every day. 99% of it is very nice. It's more a way for me to feel connected to people. Sometimes I feel like I'm sitting up here in the studio and I ask, "Am I doing this all for myself?" Unlike a standup comedian who is up there and gets the laughter, I'm asking myself, "Is this any good? Are they laughing?" It's helpful for me to have contact with my readers, and for them to feel that I'm somewhat acc essible.

JG: I recently did a TV satellite tour in which I was staring into the red eye of the camera with no immediate audience presence to respond to my words... it sounds similar to when you are up here in your studio.

JM: I have to be amusing myself. There are definitely cartoons I draw that I like... and there are others that are "textbook" that readers will like. Humor is so subjective. It wouldn't work if I edited myself to doing purely what really cracks me up. There are other panels that I just draw and go, "I don't know, we'll send it in and see the reaction," and then my editor calls and says, "That's great!" This was more noticeable when I was a freelancer. I'd send a batch of ten cartoons off to a magazine, and the one I had the least faith in was the one they would buy. As you know, it's hard to decide what is funny and what's going to work.

JG: We do know that humor works in a variety of settings-- business, education, and parenting. We've also done a lot of work with the humor-health connection.

JM: If there's any niche I feel I'm in, it would be medically-oriented cartoons. In fact, I want to do a collection of my cartoons specifically on medical/dental situations, because I think that is one of the most stressful aspects of life-- having to go to the hospital, being really sick.... Stressful situations make for great cartoon material, and that's why DILBERT is so successful, because people are just stressed out. You can play off of things that are getting people angry and upset, and turn that around. Humor and anger, humor and stress are very closely linked. If you can take someone's anger and turn it around, it can result in very powerful humor. If you can create a cartoon which expresses someone's anger... it leads to a release of anger . I think the same could be said of stress. There's a lot of stress in hospitals, so I like to play off of that.

I did a cartoon recently where I showed a guy lying on the operating table grinning. You're looking over the shoulder of the surgeon, who is reading an entertainment-like coupon book that says, "This coupon good for one complimentary organ transplant with the purchase of another organ transplant of equal or greater value." The caption said, "Ray loved a bargain." I got e-mail from a reader who said, "What kind of a monster are you to make fun of organ donorship? I can't imagine what kind of depraved individual would find humor in this situation." He then went on to say that his daughter died while waiting for an organ transplant. I felt terrible. I wrote back and said that it certainly wasn't my intent to offend. I was not planning to upset people , and quite frankly, hadn't even looked at it from that angle. I could have picked "bypass surgery" but I just happened to pick "organ donorship." For this man, that was a very sensitive topic.

Another cartoon I drew about a year earlier involved balloon angioplasty. I got a letter about a month after that ran from a reader who said that on Christmas Day in 1994, he was rushed into the hospital with a massive heart attack. He was hospitalized for a couple weeks and on January 17 he went in for a balloon angioplasty surgery. Coincidentally, that was the day my cartoon ran. The surgeons saw my cartoon that morning, got the cartoon blown up to poster-size, and put it all around the walls of the operating room, so that when he was wheeled into the room, here was this cartoon. Immediately he just started laughing and couldn't stop laughing. The surgeons were laughing. It just set the tone for the whole operation. It just completely put him to ease. That made me feel fantastic.

How is that one person in that situation takes offense... this guy just as easily could have reacted like the other guy and said, "How could you make fun of this situation... I was in there for life-or-death surgery...." From what I can tell from the letters I get, 99% of the time readers "get" my humor. But there is some faction of people who take it totally the opposite direction from which I intended it. So, then I wrestle with, "I don't want to offend people, so do I not do stuff like that?" But t hen I think I risk putting out material that is so blase that no one gets anything out of it.

JG: It's an irony that on one hand part of your success is the power of identification or recognition... being able to see yourself in the cartoon. The irony is that the success is based on being "close to home," but for some people it may occasionally be "too close to home"... where they are too close to the pain to see the humor.

JM: I find that cartoons that work best are those that people can identify with... my hope is that people will not only laugh at my cartoons but at themselves as well. If I can do that for somebody, that would be a tremendous feeling of satisfaction-- to help people step back and not take their lives that seriously for a moment.

At this point, John's 4-year-old son, Pete, comes bounding in and asks if we want to see the Kids Olympics. After the main event (Pete jumping over couch cushions in the living room), we resume the interview.

JG: Speaking of living in the moment... my own kids have been my most important teachers when it comes to humor and creativity... I'm curious about the influence of Pete on you and your work. I suppose you could take the feeding, clothing, and sheltering of Pete as a tax deduction, since he may be the inspiration for some of your work.

JM: I'm probably doing more parenting panels. Once again, parenting is another source of stress... which translates into good cartoons. Pete's also very interested in drawing and does a lot of drawing.

JG: From your mailbox, are there any other success stories or touching letters you've received?

JM: There have been other medical-related cartoons where people have gone in for open-heart surgery and saw one of my cartoons and it helped them to get through a tough moment. That's the stuff that make me go, "WOW!" It's easy to draw cartoons all day long... and also to ask, "What am I doing? What's my impact on society? What difference does this make to anybody?" I can get in a funk every once in a while and ask myself those questions... getting a letter like that will revive me and make me feel that I made a difference and got someone to laugh.

JG: A paradox: on the one hand, you are isolated-- working in your own solitary studio. At the same time, your work is entering the home of millions of people each day. Do you have any hopes or plans?

JM: I'd like to win a Pulitzer Prize. I'd like to win a Pulitzer Prize. I'd like to win a Pulitzer Prize. That's my daily affirmation. Actually, I hope that people are going to see my panel in the newspaper and it's going to give them a little brighter start to the day. Maybe I could be like Alvin-the-van-driver (see Volume 10,

JG: Well, you could always have a Close to Home Theme Park! How do you keep going... recently, we've had both Gary Larson and Bill Watterson retire... Given the nature of your work, how do you keep resilient and keep on going? What do you do on a day that you don't feel funny?

JM: I always feel funny! No, of course, that does happen. I try to work my way through the dry spell. Actually, the creative, "funny" part of cartooning is only about 5% of my work. The rest is drawing, elaborating on an idea, talking with people on the phone or keeping up on paperwork. So if I'm trying to work on a cartoon idea and nothing is coming to me, I move on to something else and try again later that day or the next day.

I have to really work at it. I read lots of magazines... Fitness, U.S. News & World Report, Good Housekeeping, and sift through them and look for things that are going on that could spark an idea. I'll get a book about some issue that people are bothered by and try to look for the humor in the situation.

JG: Is there any question that you haven't been asked in the past that you're just dying to be asked?

JG: You've given us so many good looks at the lighter side of life. I look forward to Close to Home being part of our Chicken Soup for the Laughing Soul book. I'm glad that you are close to my home... and through this interview, close to home for our readers!