Jim Karpen Tips

April 2001

What can I say? I admit to a fondness for New Yorker cartoons. Of course, people's tastes vary, but if, like me, you've always gotten a special laugh from these ubiquitous cartoons that always seem to capture the zeitgeist, then head on over to Cartoonbank.com, a collection of some 30,000 New Yorker cartoon classics.

The very first thing I did was search for my all-time favorite, which I once came across in an issue of the magazine in a Laundromat. It wonderfully captured the idiosyncratic view of English majors, which I was at the time. But I didn't find it. I'll have to try searching again.

The search function seems to search the text of the captions as well as an editor's notion of what the cartoon is about. When "English major" didn't turn up anything, I searched on "English" and found cartoons that had that word in the caption but also a variety of funny cartoons having to do with the English language. My favorite: one man is talking to another in a bar and is saying, "What I don't, like, get is how she, like, figured out I was, like, having an affair with, like, the babysitter."

The advanced search lets you specify whether to search by keyword, caption, cartoonist, ID#, topic, publication date, and more.

The site also offers free ecards, that is, electronic greeting cards that are getting so popular nowadays. You can choose to send ecard cartoons in categories such as Love & Marriage, Money, Friendship, Feel Better, Congrats, Holidays, Classics, Psychology, Doctors, Lawyers, Business, Birthday, Politics, Food, Sports, Travel, and Computers (which includes the famous one with two dogs in front of a computer and one saying to the other, "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog.")

Just like other ecard web sites, you can send these cards free as electronic greetings, writing in your own salutation, message, and close. Or you can simply use these categories as a way of browsing the database of cartoons.

The "Cartoon Channel" link puts a cartoon in a popup window on your screen, with a new cartoon appearing every minute.

There's also a selection of "vanity cartoons," which give you the option of inserting a specific name into the caption (e.g., Moses holding the 10 commandments and looking up toward the heavens saying, "Thou shalt not covet _______. Aren't we getting a little specific, Lord?")

You can also order framed or matted prints or T-shirts and sweatshirts with any cartoon and can license cartoons for use in any medium, such as a brochure or web site.

© 2001 by Jim Karpen, Ph.D. (#259)