—Bill Hayes
The cartoonist Roz Chast thinks of herself as a storyteller, one who is always on the hunt for the sweet spot where the ridiculous and the uncomfortable converge. A good joke needs to have an "emotional aspect," she said in a phone interview recently. "Something that was annoying, but also seems sort of funny to me."
It's an approach that's served Chast well during a distinguished career that has spanned more than 40 years and earned her numerous awards, including the prestigious Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society. But she didn't start out aspiring to draw cartoons. Born in Brooklyn in 1954, Chast was the only child of two educators who regarded comic books as a waste of time. Her artistic inclinations were evident at a young age, however—her parents provided her with paper and a pencil to entertain herself at restaurants—and reading cartoons in the New Yorker kindled what would become a lifelong love of the work of Charles Addams, whose work she cites as an inspiration.
Chast attended Kirkland College and the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received her BFA with a vague idea of pursuing a career in painting. It didn't pan out, though, because, as she told one interviewer, "I'm sort of a bad painter." Her unsuccessful efforts to drum up work as an illustrator were also "depressing." In 1978, after selling cartoons to a few publications, she decided to submit her portfolio to the New Yorker. When she went to retrieve her work the next week, she recalled in a profile years later, "I was absolutely flabbergasted and terrified when I found out I had sold something."
Chast's work marked a shift away from an era in which many New Yorker cartoonists worked using prewritten gags. Her comics incorporated her own distinctive lettering, which often quivers or balloons alarmingly. And she came up with her own zany jokes, ones that often feature characters paralyzed by existential dread or their own neuroses. (A 2023 strip titled "Bad at Bohemia" shows a cartoon version of Chast sitting awkwardly on a couch in the middle of a party, thinking, "Still haven't done my taxes," while a couple in fishnets and mohawks makes out beside her.) Her comics also slyly conjure up a world in which the banal and the sinister coexist together uneasily. (In one Chast kitchen, a tidy collection of matching retro containers lines a counter in order of descending size, emblazoned with the labels "flour," "sugar," "coffee," "tea," and "microplastics.")
This style—a kind of carefully curated derangement—has made Chast "the pre-eminent New Yorker cartoonist of the late-20th and early-21st century," said the magazine's former cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff. But she also "has an integrated body of work that transcends any publication." (In addition to somewhere around 900 New Yorker cartoons, her work has appeared in numerous other outlets as well as in her own books for both adults and children.)
Chast's milieu may be her beloved New York City, but her work has universal appeal, perhaps best exemplified by the success of her 2014 best-seller, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a comic-book-style memoir that depicts Chast's efforts to care for her elderly parents during the final years of their lives. That book's heavy themes may seem, at first, to be incongruous with an art form that is typically regarded as lighthearted or even frivolous. But in writing Pleasant, Chast says, she was following in the footsteps of artists who have taken on life-and-death subjects in their comics, including Art Spiegelman, whose groundbreaking Maus books dealt with the Holocaust, and Fun Home author Alison Bechdel, who has used her work to explore familial dysfunction and her father's suicide.
Pleasant was also a critical hit, winning a Kirkus Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. And it was the first graphic novel to be nominated as a finalist for the nonfiction National Book Award. Chast calls it "shocking" that it took so long for comics to receive that recognition.
But it's fitting. As our culture becomes increasingly visual, comics and graphic novels are reaching wider audiences and new generations of readers who are looking for ways to understand both the painful and funny truths about the human experience. These audiences already appreciate the fact, Chast says, that "telling a story in pictures and in words could be as meaningful, as literary, as a more traditional book that was just text."
—Alyson Foster
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