She is a cartoonist and she probably has to have more insights into human nature before she can reduce the idea to a few lines that make for a funny picture. So no wonder Roz Chast, author and cartoonist, comes with many profound statements.
“Humour has lot of anger in it,” she says “My mother had a horrible temper. She was a disciplinarian. So expressing anger openly was a Oh no no no….” And that is what, says Chast, propelled her career,” I was an only child and my parents were a lot older. When I was alone with them, they would give me a paper and pencil and tell me to keep busy…don’t go outside, stay inside, don’t give us reason to worry, basically don’t do anything…that is how you occupy yourself. You are pretty upset and angry and you know anger is an engine….”
And parents thought the best way to propel a genius into action was by sending children to innumerable classes!
Chast, who is famous for her cartoons in the New Yorker, says, “Style of drawing is very much like handwriting…it is a combination of how it happened and bits and pieces that you take from people…it is an expression of my character…it is a natural style…”
Chast says her desire for cartooning was not met with that much of enthusiasm in the seventies. She studied in an arts school where,… “being funny was the worst sin of all…that was really tacky because you were not serious.”
She however stuck to it. Her break came when she dropped off some cartoons at The New Yorker. She has since been cartooning for them. “I turn in 6-8 cartoons every week. If I am lucky, they take one. Sometimes they do not take any. In a year once or twice they may take two. But most of all I do get rejected. I have thousands of rejected cartoons. I used to send them elsewhere but now there are fewer places that take them…So when I finish a cartoon there is the relief of having done something but also the nagging worry if they will take it or not. There is always the voice that tells you bad things but there are also other things that take you forward…” The angst hangs on even if you are “successful”.
Couches figure prominently in Chast’s cartoons and she says that is the best place she likes to be, “Why get up when I have everything I need here?” And then that is where her parents left her most of the time.
“Some of my cartoons do get a little wordy but sometimes they boil down to essentially what it is…I do not do political cartoons…. You have the feeling that the sky is falling down but oh…where is the coffee…? So the trivial and the larger go together.”
Chast says,”When you work digitally you do not have an object but I like having the object, I like the feel of paper…”
