Funny business Roz Chast’s witty world view BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Back in 1978, The New Yorker did a very strange thing. They started running cartoons by an unknown 23-year-old named Roz Chast. However wry and height-of-sophistication their cartoons had been before, they usually were single-panel rim-shots, relying on a guy-oriented punch line. Now the boys’ club was breached. In the door swept wit to vie with gags, often multi-paneled to facilitate the chatty, sardonic humor.

A 1977 Rhode Island School of Design graduate, Chast will be speaking about her life as a cartoonist on Wednesday, October 15 at 6:15 p.m. in the RISD Auditorium. The talk is free and open to the public. (Call 454-6500.)

Although under contract with The New Yorker, which has first refusal on her work, Chast also is published in Harvard Business Review, The Sciences, and Scientific American. She has published several collections of work; an anthology titled The Party, After You Left: Collected Cartoons 1995-2003 will be published in April.

Chast, 47, was raised in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn by parents who were an assistant principal and a high school teacher. Growing up, she enjoyed the quirky cartoons of Edward Gorey and Charles Addams, she has said in interviews. Her own humor ranges in subject matter and tone from the surreal to the transcendentally ordinary. In one panel labeled "G.P.S. Satellites Gone Bad," above a car emitting "La-la-la" and music notes, one satellite says to a couple of others, "Anybody in the mood for a quick round of Ring Around the Destination?" In "The Iron Chef at Home," as well as kids complaining at the table behind the fuming guy at the stove, his wife is remarking, "Whatever it is you’re making, it sure is using a lot of pots and pans."

Chast now works from her home in suburban Connecticut, south of Danbury, where she lives with her two children and humor-writer husband Bill Franzen. She spoke recently by phone from there.

Q: You drew cartoons as a kid, but at RISD you majored in painting. What happened?

A: I actually started out in graphic design, to be practical. I didn’t think I’d be able to make my living as a cartoonist. I hated it — I was horrible at it. And then I switched to illustration. I thought that would be more suitable, more drawing and stuff. That was OK, but I was living with painters and just wanted to be a painter, despite all the evidence pointing to the fact that I was not really a painter. Then when I got out of school I went back to my first love.

Q: Was it surprising when you were so widely accepted at the beginning?

A: Yes and no. I mean, in some ways it’s still a huge surprise to make a living doing what I do. Unless you grow up with a very optimistic attitude, it’s like: "You mean, I don’t have to work at CVS 11 hours a day? This is just maaaaarvelous!" So, yeah, that surprises me.

Q: What about what readers were feeling? Most panels were gag cartoons at the time.

A: It’s like: What makes me laugh, what is funny to me? It just felt so weird to kind of have to impose a form on it that didn’t come naturally to me. I had done a couple of gag cartoons, but in general that’s not how I think.

Q: How ever did you manage to wean The New Yorker away from punch line cartoons?

A: I didn’t really think that I would wind up being a cartoonist for The New Yorker. I didn’t expect to sell cartoons to them. It was really a surprise to me. I think that I was just very lucky to have an editor who was receptive.

Q: Did he give you feedback about how your cartoons were being responded to? Did he have to argue you into the pages?

A: The person who was the editor-in-chief at the time, William Shawn, apparently liked my stuff. But I know that there were a lot of other people who didn’t. Some of the old-timers, traditional cartoonists. I remember him saying once that someone asked him if he owed my family money!

Q: It’s one thing to turn the ordinary into humor, but it’s another thing to do it day after day and then on deadline once a week. So what’s your process for keeping prolific and fresh?

A: I like deadlines a lot. And I think that people who work to deadline, if you don’t like it then you wind up doing something else. I like it because I’m a huge procrastinator. I like to wait till almost the last minute, and then it really does help me focus. I usually write down a bunch of ideas during the week, that’s my usual process. My deadline is Tuesday evening, and so Mondays and Tuesdays I’m usually working on what we cartoonists call the batch. Which is a certain number of cartoons it could be five, it could be 10, it could be 15. And they’re rough, they’re sketches. Then if you’re lucky they buy one. Every blue moon they might buy two. And the rest are, I hate to use the word "rejects," but that’s essentially what they are.

Q: I don’t imagine that you’re very anxious about running out of ideas, because you’re drawing from an attitude, which you’ll always have. But are there fallow periods for you?

A: Oh, absolutely. I worry about running out of ideas all the time. If you were a dancer, there are going to be times when you’re more inspired or less. I feel so incredibly grateful that I have this chance to do this that I’ll usually pull out some old [rejected] cartoons and see if something’s there, look at them and get inspired, see a way to reconfigure them to make them funnier, or whatever.

Q: Back at 9/11, did that seem like the death of the funny to you, as it did to so many others who make their living from humor? What was your first cartoon afterward?

A: I did a cartoon of a woman looking in a book shop window, and there’s a sign that says: "Now with 50 percent less irony." Everybody was talking about the death of irony. It definitely seemed like a different time, sort of. I mean, when you look back at that time, it was a twofold thing: on the one hand, it was the enormity of this thing that happened, but then nobody really knew whether it was going to stop, whether it was going to change things permanently. And it did, but thank God, humor does survive, when you’re not in that kind of crisis anymore. Then when you have a chance to breathe, you can find things funny again.