Will McPhail's desperation comedy
How the New Yorker cartoonist mines heartbreak for laughs.
Of the roughly 130 cartoons that Will McPhail has published in the New Yorker, a notable number feature mice and rats. In one such cartoon, from the summer of 2018, a rodent gazes up through the grate in a damp, cell-like sewer and asks its companion, “Do you ever wish that a different place felt like home?”
“A worrying thing that I haven’t unpacked yet, and maybe we can do it now, is that a lot of my most personal thoughts that appear in my cartoons I’ve decided to voice through the mouths of vermin,” McPhail told me over Zoom in January. He was calling from his home in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he has lived for the last decade or so. Behind him was a pleasant kitchen vista: copper pans hanging against white subway tiles, a Moka pot, a slice of a white refrigerator with rounded edges.
When McPhail drew that cartoon for the New Yorker, he had been feeling down about the town where he was raised in the northwest of England. “Chorley itself is kind of grim, and there’s this constant air of violence in the atmosphere,” he explained. “I found myself thinking, I wish a better place felt like home.” He decided that a sewer rat would be an appropriate vessel for that rather vulnerable thought. A cartoonist could express his feelings through a more dignified creature, but McPhail is tickled by animals that seem downtrodden. “Desperation is so funny to me,” he said. “So many of my characters look like this —”
Here, McPhail demonstrated a facial expression that appears in many of his cartoons: head thrown back, eyes pinched up, mouth rubberized and stretched into a wail of anguish.
Whether through human or animal characters, McPhail has a talent for locating the humor in melancholy. His cartoons often express the insecurity, frustration, and panic that lurks just beneath normal, everyday life — while we’re drinking coffee, having sex, or huddling over our laptops. It’s not always that existential: Sometimes he draws a fly reclining on a bowl of fruit, posing for a group of art students like Kate Winslet in Titanic. Regardless of his subject, McPhail’s art is wonderful to look at. He works in pencil and watercolor, with an occasional bit of ink to dot the pupil of an eye. His style is graceful and fluid, which can add a breezy nonchalance to an otherwise silly setup.
Calvin and Hobbes is a foundational text for McPhail, who, at 36, would have been seven years old when Bill Watterson published his final newspaper strip in 1995 (one year older than Calvin, who is perpetually six). Watterson’s signature move was to juxtapose Calvin’s wild imagination — he’s a T-Rex, an outer space explorer, a noir detective! — against the stifling realities of childhood: homework, bath time, suspicious green mush for dinner. McPhail has a similar way of pairing imaginative flourishes with the emotional grind of daily life. “[Calvin and Hobbes] was my only intake of any kind of culture for a long time,” he said. “I’ve always been very happy to put emotion in there and try to make people feel pathos… humor and pathos and sadness, all mixed together. That’s what Calvin and Hobbes is, really.”
There isn’t a time in McPhail’s memory when he wasn’t drawing. He hated art classes in school, though, and instead chose to study zoology at university. “I’ve got a chip on my shoulder about needing permission to be creative,” he said. His uncle Rodger is a wildlife artist, and coming out of school, McPhail imagined he might do the same, or at least become the guy who draws the illustrations that appear in textbooks. “Honestly, I owe a lot to him,” McPhail said of his uncle. “I think he gave me one lesson when he realized I wanted to do it, but more than that, we both come from very working class, small, northern town communities where people don’t have those jobs, really, and he was just a visible example that you could have that as a job… He made me feel like it was possible.”
While McPhail was in university, he began selling cartoons to Private Eye and The New Statesman. The New Yorker, at that time, was a personal Everest. “It took me a long time just to get up the courage to send anything because I didn’t think I was good enough,” he said. He graduated in 2011, and, a few years later, he began putting together batches of cartoons and mailing them to the New Yorker’s offices every week, per the magazine’s submission guidelines. After a few months, an editor named Colin Stokes reached out to McPhail and gave him a direct email address for his submissions, along with some words of encouragement.
Pretending he had other business in Manhattan, McPhail crossed the Atlantic on an “embarrassing pilgrimage” to the New Yorker’s office. Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of the magazine until 2017, held open office hours on Tuesdays, allowing cartoonists to have their submissions assessed in real time. Not long after his voyage, the New Yorker bought a cartoon from McPhail. “I was, like, diabolically proud,” said McPhail, who celebrated by buying a bottle of champagne and some gummy candy.
After the New Yorker published his second cartoon, McPhail spotted a man reading a copy of the magazine on a train. McPhail missed several stops waiting for the man to reach his drawing. Eventually he did, and the young cartoonist was rewarded with “the slightest exhale” of recognition.
***
Now McPhail is a full-time professional cartoonist. Every morning, he walks for about an hour, in order to “oxygenate” his brain. Then he sits down at his desk for his equivalent of a nine-to-five. A lot of his work involves staring at his notepad and thinking, but he’s strict about keeping his butt in his seat. “All of my family members have got very worthwhile jobs,” said McPhail. “They all actually clock in, put hours in, and work really, manually hard. It’s taken some time to work out what my version of that is, to not make me feel like a dickhead who’s just scribbling away. I think it’s literally just chaining myself to a desk.”
Submitting a batch of cartoon ideas to the New Yorker every week is the primary structure in McPhail’s working life. “I think I’ll submit cartoons pretty much every week, or every other week, until I die,” he said. Cartoons are due by noon Eastern on Tuesdays, which is 5 p.m. in Scotland. McPhail spends the week jotting down cartoon ideas as they come to him, then wakes early on Tuesday and draws rough drafts of the best ones. “I just smash it all out,” he said. When the New Yorker buys one of those ideas, he’ll create a nicer version of it for publication.
In addition to selling cartoons to the New Yorker — plus prints and original cartoons on his own website — McPhail has published two books, a cartoon collection, Love & Vermin, and a graphic novel, In., that centers on a young illustrator, Nick, who struggles to connect with other people. It’s sharp and funny, but it’s also McPhail’s most overtly earnest work to date. McPhail recently sold a film option for In., and the prospect of a screen adaptation has him thinking about movies that pair otherwise grounded stories with fantastical leaps, like The Truman Show and Groundhog Day.
McPhail is also “writing something without any pictures in it,” which is a fun way to avoid using the phrase “a novel.” Drawing isn’t exactly mindless, he said, but there’s a part of him that’s able to switch off, even when working on something as substantial as a graphic novel. “It’s a cliche to call it meditation, but that’s where I’m at my most free-thinking and peaceful, at my desk with a pencil,” he said. Writing prose is a very different proposition. “Every word takes every bit of my attention, and there’s no phase where I can turn my brain off a little bit,” he said.
The big hurdles in McPhail’s cartooning career have been learning to cope with rejection and finding his voice, artistically and comedically. Dealing with rejection is, in my experience, a matter of gradual immunization; McPhail said that he’s bulletproof now, to the extent that he has trouble enjoying praise. Finding your voice is harder, partly because it requires quieting the voices of everyone you admire. For a while, McPhail imitated the style of Calvin and Hobbes, drawing characters’ eyes as big, oblong dots. “You realize, eventually, that the reason you like him is that he was entirely himself,” said McPhail. Now the eyes that McPhail draws are round and full of life, lids twitching in terror or slack with exhaustion.
Emma Allen, the current cartoon editor of the New Yorker, told me in an email that, more and more, she’s seen McPhail lean into the expressive elements of his drawings. “He’s such a brilliant draughtsman, I suspect it took him a minute to realize that perfection in a drawing is not always the funniest approach,” she wrote. “That, and he finally fleshed out the painfully skinny limbs of his poor creations, who were previously at risk of having their legs snapped by a light breeze.”
Earlier in his career, McPhail tried to draw cartoons that the New Yorker would buy, rather than cartoons that would make him laugh. “It’s understandable, because realistically I want to sell a cartoon and pay the bills,” he said. “But eventually you realize that all of the best art, whether it be literary or music or whatever, happens to be the art that that person purely wants to do for themselves.”
***
McPhail wrote another book long before In. and Love & Vermin. Upon mentioning it, he disappeared off-camera to retrieve his copy.
How to Look After Your Snes, written by “William” at age 5, is a guide to snake husbandry. The cover art reveals an early mastery of perspective: A person, perhaps the author, peers at the reader through a glass snake tank. Undeterred by a lack of real-life experience with snakes, the amateur herpetologist offered advice on such matters as feeding (“Hold the ded mows teyul and Jropr it in feyd it tow tims a day”), play (“Put it rowd yor nek and let it slidr arone”), and grooming (“Wipr yor hasr a kro it and put it in the bath”).
“My poor mum, when her already weird, quiet child came home and was like, ‘I’ve written something, Mother,’” said McPhail, adopting a high, creepy tone.
It’s easy to see how this book portended both McPhail’s zoology studies and his artistic interest in lizards, pigeons, dolphins, slugs, cockroaches, and moles (often of the “whack-a-” variety). He’s fascinated by animals and loves to see them out in the wild, but he’s not a pet person. “A part of me dies when I see any kind of animal inside,” said McPhail. “People who keep birds as pets are psychopaths. The thing that we like about birds is that they can fly, and you’re putting them in a cage inside. What is wrong with you?”
He did, however, own a pet once. When he was 21 and in university, his family presented him with How to Look After Your Snes, long forgotten at that point, along with an actual snake. In fairness to the McPhail family, the book concludes with the following riddle:
What am I
I am gren and yellow
I hav no legs
I hav a red thog
I reliy wot a snek
McPhail named the snake Bellatrix, after the Harry Potter villain. Bellatrix liked to escape from her tank and hide around his flat, as well as his neighbors’ homes, but the worst aspect of snake ownership was feeding time. Bellatrix was a small snake who couldn’t swallow whole baby mice, so McPhail found himself buying frozen mouslings from the pet shop and slicing them up with a craft knife on his drawing desk.
“When I would cut it in half, there would always be this white thing that disappeared when it thawed out. I went to the pet shop and was like, ‘What’s that white thing that goes away?’, thinking it was its soul or something,” he said. “He was like, ‘Oh, no, that’s its last meal. That’s the milk from its mother.’”
McPhail gave Bellatrix to someone who didn’t mind her Houdini antics and put snake husbandry behind him. The fate of the snake, with her unconquerable will to roam free, is unknown.
One of the common misconceptions about cartoonists is that they want to hear your great ideas for a comic. Nevertheless, the Bellatrix saga immediately sounded to me like a perfect Will McPhail cartoon, one about, say, a grown man encountering a snake he knew when they were young and living in a university flat together. Then I realized that this basic premise already was a Will McPhail cartoon — one of my favorites, in fact.
That 18-panel vignette begins with a man releasing his pet turtle into a park. The guy looks sad and haunted. Maybe he’s wracked by guilt about keeping a wild animal in a tank, or maybe he feels guilty about abandoning a domesticated animal outdoors. Maybe he and his ex bought the turtle together, and it has become a painful reminder of his past. It’s hard to say. Either way, the creature flourishes, building a cocktail bar for turtles and mice, then a bigger bar for humans, too. The man comes by one night, and the two lock eyes. Across the room, they raise a glass to one another.
It makes me want to cry a little, because it makes me think of the people I’ve drifted away from, whom I probably won’t ever be close with again but still hope are happy. It’s bittersweet, but it’s okay. The man and the turtle are going to be okay.
***
McPhail says that as a kid, he was a bit of a rascal — something of a Calvin, you might say. As a university student working at the local supermarket, he staved off boredom by attempting to summon certain items through his checkout lane using telekinesis, then celebrated wildly when those items came through his lane. “They told me to go outside because I was messing around too much,” McPhail said. Collecting shopping carts outside the store, he would defy management’s rule of pushing no more than eight carts at once by building mega-stacks of carts, inevitably crashing into obstacles in his path.
In a professional setting, McPhail seems to exercise this impulse toward mischief by compulsively giving silly — sometimes unpublishable — answers to questions before responding seriously. When I first emailed him to ask if he was open to a 45-minute interview, he declined in a terse note, explaining that he only did 44-minute Zoom calls. Then he wrote back to say that, yes, he would be happy to talk. This dance happened so many times during our conversation, which went well over 44 minutes, that I had to ask him about it.
“It’s a nightmare,” he said. “Do you know where I realized that I did that? I did a little book tour in Italy, and I don’t speak Italian, so I had a translator. Somebody would ask me a question, the translator would translate, and then I’d do that thing: silly answer, she’d have to translate, then I’d go, ‘No, but seriously…’ And when it was broken up, it just felt so stupid.”
McPhail certainly isn’t the only person in the humor business with this tendency. Still, I wondered where it came from, and he told me that he’d been thinking about it as well. Lately he’d been sneaking into Edinburgh’s ornate private gardens, access to which is restricted to the people who live in the adjacent homes. He brought a date with him on one of these excursions, and she asked why this was a hobby of his.
“At first, I’d tell people that I did it because I’m taking it back to the working class, sticking it to the rich! And that is not just not true. I realized that when I get in there, and I’m scampering across the grass, it feels exactly the same in my stomach as when I would kick a ball over my garden fence, it would go into the neighbor’s garden, and I would sneak in and run across their beautifully trimmed lawn to grab the ball, hoping that they didn’t see me,” he said. “I think it’s a trend in my life where I’m chasing that feeling of being a kid.”
McPhail’s favorite comedians — Rory Scovel, Kate Berlant, John Early — are those who make him laugh in a visceral, childlike way, like he’s a kid at school. He’s not friends with many “real, straight artists,” as he finds that whole enterprise a bit humorless. He prefers the company of comedians, actors, other New Yorker cartoonists, and friends with jobs that have nothing to do with the arts. McPhail is an exceptional artist, but, he told me, “The truth is, I’m not an arty guy.”
Among McPhail’s comedy heroes is Nora Ephron. A few years ago, he published an illustrated review of Ephron’s 1983 novel Heartburn, a thinly veiled account of her divorce from Carl Bernstein. As McPhail wrote, the book is all about “dressing pain up in a humorous hat for a little second,” something that Ephron was uniquely skilled at. Her mother, a screenwriter, famously taught her daughters that “everything is copy.” Everything Is Copy, a 2015 documentary about Ephron’s life, opens with the following meditation on the family maxim:
“I now believe that what my mother meant was this: When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you, but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero, rather than the victim, of the joke. I think that’s what she meant. On the other hand, she may merely have meant: Everything is copy.”
There are a thousand reasons to love Nora Ephron, and maybe I’ll detail all of them in this newsletter one day. (#56: She and Nicholas Pileggi, her third husband and the co-writer of Goodfellas, got married in a surprise ceremony at a dinner party, and her big regret was that she had it catered rather than cooking the food herself.) But a lot of us go to her for comfort. I don’t think Ephron is comforting simply because she wrote quotable, lovable, rewatchable rom-coms, although that’s true, too. I turn to Ephron when I’m feeling depressed because nobody has ever been so good at taking embarrassment and heartbreak and whipping them into a soufflé of self-awareness and wit. It’s hard to get too carried away with your despair while reading one of her books or watching one of her movies. For a few hours, her ability to make a joke out of misery becomes your own.
“She’s the shining example of how to use autobiography, where she turns these tragic moments into nourishing comedy. It’s amazing. It’s magic,” McPhail told me. And he’s learned how to do that magic, too. He sends batches of cartoons to the New Yorker every week because it’s his livelihood, but it also helps him work through his personal issues. “The hardest times I’ve been through, I try to do cartoons at that time because it gives me not only an outlet, but a little documented part of my life,” he said. “I put whatever I’m feeling into those cartoons.”
In one such cartoon, a man is curled up in bed, making the desperate facial expression that McPhail had demonstrated for me. The man cries out: “Quit hogging the sheets, loveless void!” It’s a funny cartoon, and one that will be relatable to anyone who has found themselves overwhelmed by the absence of love in their life at some lonely hour of the night. “It’s a good enough joke to be sold, but I was actually gutted about a breakup that had just happened,” McPhail said.
Like Ephron, McPhail is adept at zooming out, realizing how insane a situation is, and getting it down on paper in a funnier way than it happened. “Not only does it make a good cartoon that I’m proud of, it helps me out of it. It helps me see it in a different way. The physical act of drawing that face” — and here he again pulled his own face into that desperate, silent cry — “makes me laugh every time.” And if it can provide comfort and a laugh to someone else, too? What a gift.
This is such a fantastic interview – so happy to have discovered it.