Leo Aloysius Cullum, a fellow-cartoonist here at The New Yorker, died the other week at the age of sixty-eight. He was a master of the traditional gag cartoon and all its genres: befuddled salarymen, people chatting in bars, exchanges in doctors’ offices, desert-island jokes, pie-chart gags, talking dogs (and cats and penguins and fish and elephants), and so much more. In his hands, the gag was always fresh. The magazine began publishing his work in 1977, and, since then, eight hundred and twenty of his cartoons have appeared in its pages.
According to his brother, Thomas, “Leo has been funny since he was a little kid—he was kind of a humor prodigy.” At the dinner table one night during a summer vacation when Leo was seven and Thomas nine, their father complained that his stomach had got a little sunburned. Leo said, “Well, you know, Dad, things that are closest to the sun burn first.” Fortunately, his father laughed.
Leo’s cartoons were a perfect marriage of drawing and caption. His visual style was straightforward and economical. He drew with an efficient medium-weight line—not particularly bold and brash, but not anxious and self-effacing. And his gags were truly out there: unexpected and completely loopy. In one of his cartoons, a group of cavemen sit on rocks around a campfire, which is, as we know from cartoons, what cavemen do. Another caveman points toward an empty rock and asks the group, “Is anyone using this rock?”
The week after September 11, 2001, the magazine published, for the second time in its history, an issue containing no cartoons. (The first was the issue that John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” appeared in.) The following week, the cartoons returned, among them Leo’s leadoff: a woman sits at a bar with a man in a checked sports coat and says to him, “I thought I’d never laugh again. Then I saw your jacket.” It was as if a door that had been slammed shut had been opened, just a little bit.
When Leo first started publishing in The New Yorker, his work was loose and rough, but over the years he became a skilled artist. His roughs were basically finishes. He made drawing cartoons look easy, and he was always funny. In one of my favorites, a cat in a business suit, answering the phone on his desk, says, “Can I call you back? I’m with a piece of string.”
The most surprising thing about Leo was that he had had a life outside of cartooning. For thirty-four years, starting in 1968, he was a commercial airline pilot, for T.W.A. He drew during layovers, and he sold his first cartoon to the magazine Air Line Pilot. He wasn’t the only cartoonist who had a second job. Some of us are sitcom writers or art teachers or painters, or even sculptors. “Airline pilot,” however, is a job that requires a whole different set of skills from “cartoonist.” Most cartoonists are not the calmest, most collected people in the world. Things throw us off kilter or rub us the wrong way. Also, we get distracted. We are, as a group, friendly, sane, intelligent people, but I would not want one of us to be at the controls of any plane that I was on. Leo was different. He was competent, calm, confident but not overbearing, and not in the least neurotic, as far as I could see. I would have happily boarded any plane that he was in charge of. ♦
