Mort Gerberg and I met in 2017, in a stuffy conference room/holding pen in the offices of The New Yorker. We were among the dozen or so people who milled about that day, each of us waiting our turn to show our drawings to the cartoon editor, Emma Allen.
I had just sold my first cartoon to the magazine; Mort, who started contributing in 1965, had sold hundreds. In that room, Mort was a legend, but he wore the status lightly—joking, inquisitive, and kind to all, including newcomers like me. We struck up a conversation about sketching from life, and before long, in spite of the sixty years between us, we were fast friends.
Today, at ninety-three years old, Mort is still regularly contributing cartoons to The New Yorker, as he has for the past fifty-nine years. He and his wife, Judith, have since moved from Manhattan to Denver, to be closer to family, but we’ve continued to talk regularly, trading updates about life, work, and the other cartoonists. This is my first visit to his new home: I’ve come to interview him about his long career, and to mine him for advice.
It’s a formidable task, to do justice to Mort’s personal history. To make a long story impossibly brief: Mort was born in Brooklyn, in 1931. He grew up short, with bad eyes and a keen interest in three things: music, drawing, and stickball.
Immediately after graduating from City College, he was drafted into the Army, where he served in the public-information office.
He then spent the remainder of his twenties in uninspiring ad-sales-promotions jobs, until, after a dramatic episode involving a flipped desk and a nearly severed finger, he left it all behind and drove to Mexico, where he spent a year reinventing himself as a cartoonist.
It worked. By 1963, Mort was selling cartoons and illustrated spreads to various smaller magazines. With some encouragement, he began submitting to The New Yorker, and spent a year or two dropping off cartoons with the receptionist each week, with no further interaction, as was standard practice in those days.
Finally, in 1965, the cartoon editor’s assistant came out to the lobby—
After some more back-and-forth with the editor, Jim Geraghty, the cartoon below ran as a full-page, in 1965. It was the beginning of a long, illustrious career.
Mort and I spend many hours looking through his drawings and books. For a while, we talk shop: Does he work from roughs? Rarely; he prefers the energy of a first draft. How does he come up with his cartoons? He keeps a list of things that have been bothering him; often, these days, his gripes come from the news.
We go on, and on. I lose track of how many times Mort says “Sorry, but I have to tell you—” and launches into a tale: drawing the 1968 Democratic Convention; pitching a book with Walt Frazier; sneaking Shel Silverstein into Disneyland; that time he met Hugh Hefner; that time Bill Clinton invited him to the Inauguration; that time he played Cole Porter’s piano in front of a packed house. Eventually, my stomach gets the better of me, and we break for lunch.