The Best of the Rejection Collection: 293 Cartoons That Were Too Dumb, Too Dark, or Too Naughty for The New Yorker

The Rejection Collection #1-2

by Matthew Diffee (Editor)

It’s the best of the 293 of the funniest cartoons rejected by The New Yorker but luckily for us, now in paperback and available to enjoy. The Rejection Collection brings together some of The New Yorker’s brightest talents—Roz Chast, Gahan Wilson, Sam Gross, Jack Zeigler, David Sipress, and more—and reveals their other side. Their dark side. Their juvenile side. Their sick side. Their naughty side. Their outrageous side.

And what a treat. Ventriloquist dummy cartoons. Operating room cartoons. Bring your daughter to work day cartoons (the stripper, the prison guard on death row). Lots of couples in bed, quite a few coffins, wise-cracking animals—an obsessive’s plumbing of the weird, the scary, the off-the-wall, and done so without restraint.

Every week The New Yorker receives 500 cartoon submissions, and rejects a great majority—mostly, of course, for not being funny enough. There’s no question why these were rejected, and it’s not for lack of laughs. One can almost hear Eustace Tilley sniffing, We are not amused.

Genres: Humor, Comics, Cartoon, Nonfiction, Graphic Novels, Art, Graphic Novels Comics

516 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2011

About the author

Matthew Diffee has been contributing cartoons to The New Yorker since 1999. His work has also appeared in Time, The Huffington Post, The Believer and Texas Monthly magazines. He is the editor of three volumes of “The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw and Never Will See in The New Yorker” published by Simon & Schuster and is working on a new book for Scribner called “Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People.” He’s done illustration work for bands like the Punch Brothers and for a special collector’s edition of Stephen King’s novel “Under the Dome.” Last year Diffee received the Silver Reuben Award for best single panel cartoonist of the year and was recently named Chairman of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Cartoonists Society.

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

One star off for coming after Murderbot. Yes, it's capricious, arbitrary, and unfair. Suck it up. I'm mourning my precious Murderbot's absence...rereads do not count!...until 27 April 2021. But with that out of the way, this collection of stuff that wasn't quite right for The New Yorker, and not infrequently just Not Quite Right, made me guffaw and grin and generally enjoy myself so much that I mostly got out of the megrims and enjoyed my day.


Why would The New Yorker think this Diffee toon was too weird to publish? Seems pretty hilarious to me....

The inimitable Roz Chast replied to Diffee's "Infrequently Asked Questions" feature:
What would make a really terrible pizza topping?
Stye ointment.
LOL

I mean, seriously! If this isn't The New Yorker's audience's jam, what is?!


This will offend some of you. I do not care. The New Yorker did, unsurprisingly...but Sipress had the last laugh, he still got them to publish it! Ha!


Harry Bliss's failed submission to The New Yorker made *me* laugh...so why not their subscribers? Hmm?


Well. Need one say more about Leo Cullum? It says a lot about The New Yorker that they *didn't* publish this one.


Mick Stevens...equal opportunity offender. Don't @ me.

There are hundreds more, the awfullest ones even *I* won't put up, but believe me when I tell you that this book cured my Murderbot hangover. You just can not stay mired in gloom when The New Yorker's funny folk are after your laugher. No, I didn't misspell laughter. English doesn't have a word for the thing inside you that makes you laugh. And NO, it's not your sense of humor! People laugh at funerals faGawdSake! (Although I've always found it telling that the word "fun" starts the whole thing off....)

Go forth and smile.

[Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a tough call rounding The Best of the Rejection Collection up to four stars. The contents can be uneven, but these are cartoons rejected for publication by the New Yorker Magazine. We are advised in advance that the contents can be

Too dumb – Horse drawn cart, drawn as in penned by a horse
Too dark – One witch to another as they peruse a restaurant menu: “I am thinking of having children”
Too naughty- think of a visual to go with the concept, bottomless cup of coffee

So a reviewer who is too critical has clearly miss understood the all too clear title.
The format for the book is to give each of 42 frequently published New Yorker cartoonist a two page questionnaire and then publishes, on average 6.97 examples of rejected cartoons. Getting that .97 th cartoon right was a challenge for most. The questions are intended to allow the cartoonists to be serious or not and that is what most of the replies are: serious or not.

The result ranges from wonderfully funny to a lot less than. But you cannot argue but that the title is fair warning. Very worth it. Best for the reader of NY cartoons, and even bester for the non-reader of the New Yorker Cartoons. Or something weird, dumb or naughty like that.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some good some not so much, but a great premise.

[Cookie M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only reason I can't give it five stars is because it doesn't have any cartoons by Roz Chast. Maybe she has never had any rejected.

Amended: It does have Roz Chast. Somehow I skipped her when I read it. Round up the rating in your mind to five.

[Stewart Tame · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the title says, this is a collection of cartoons that were turned down by The New Yorker. All the usual suspects are here: Roz Chast, Gahan Wilson, S. Gross, P.C. Vey, etc. Each cartoonist is represented by at least a couple of examples, as well as their answers to a questionnaire that was at least partially designed to elicit funny answers (e.g. "Where do you get your ideas?", "What are some things that make you laugh and why?", "What did the shepherd say to the three-legged sheepdog?", etc.) It's an interesting idea for a book, though I don't think it's markedly better or worse than any of the various New Yorker collections I've read. The questionnaires were a nice touch. It gave me a sense of the people behind the cartoons. I particularly loved Tom Cheney's answer to the question, "Come up with a name for an unpleasant medical procedure." His answer, "A colonoscopic tonsillectomy, " still makes me grin, easily the best answer to that question of all the cartoonists in the book. This was a fun book. Whether or not you'll enjoy it depends on how well you enjoy cartoon collections in general. Some of them are decidedly raunchy, but that's a plus for some people, myself included.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very enjoyable collection of cartoons that were rejected for publication in The New Yorker. Often, it's obvious why a cartoon didn't make it (scatological, sexual, and just plain gross humor abounds) but there were a few here I thought the editor should have run. I often laughed more at the "interviews" with the various cartoonists. (Actually, all the cartoonists filled out the same survey, answering questions like "Where do you get your ideas?" with absolutely hilarious results.) Some great stuff here - and I'd go so far as to say this is probably a "must-read" for fans of New Yorker cartoons.

[Rich Meyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of New Yorker cartoons and some great cartoonists. This one has some of my favorites, including P.C. Vey and Milt Gross (two of my favorites from National Lampoon). The interview sections are incredibly funny, particularly when editor Sam Mankoff answers the questions the cartoonists as asked to leave for him. Definitely a fun read, and currently free for people in Kindle Unlimited.

[TrumanCoyote · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of this was funny (and not just the cartoons). Even--unexpectedly--the intro from the NY editor himself. Who would've thought anybody working for such an August Publication could actually be cool? Sure, some of the cartoons were dumb--and some I didn't get--but that I find is true even for regular collections. And what this book really does is give you a feel for the day-to-day grind of being a professional cartoonist; it ain't all magic wands and cartoon balloons, that's for sure.

[Furrawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the cartoons are hilarious. Some of the cartoons were very not p.c. but were hilarious. Dark humor. Some of the cartoons would have been at home in Playboy so don’t let your kid read this book.

My favorite part was the pie chart given to each cartoonist. The creativity was sometimes astonishing.

The interviews… well… sometimes cartoonists were sarcastic… sometimes warm… a few were asinine & unlikable. If you have an adored New Yorker cartoonist, you might want to tread lightly less you find yourself disillusioned.

Overall, for us cartoon-lovers and New-Yorker-cartoon-lovers, it’s an enjoyable book.

[KA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes a cartoon fails because it's just downright wrong--transphobic, racist, etc. But for the most part these cartoons are hilarious, if you have a slightly warped or random sense of humor.

[Eden · Rating 2 out of 5]

2023 bk 4. The title is accurate - these cartoons were too dumb, too dark, or too naughty. What was interesting in the book was the interview with the various cartoonists and the book is a keeper for those sections, not so much the cartoons.

[Sumit Singla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haha, some of these cartoons are brilliant. The only reason I can think of for rejecting them is that they had better competition those weeks. Yes, they are not for prudes and many of them are borderline inappropriate and a small minority are downright offensive.

(Depending on where you are in the prudishness spectrum, this might vary for you.)

More enjoyable than the cartoons themselves are the insightful interviews with the cartoonists, who come up with some really funny stuff.

[Kirsti · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of cartoons that The New Yorker rejected for being vulgar, obscure, offensive, or dumb. I laughed out loud several times. For some reason, the cartoons about ventriloquist dummies get me every time.

[Samantha Grabelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read in two sittings. So cool that he interviewed all the other cartoonists and got them to answer ridiculous but telling questions and then to submit their rejected cartoons. Many of them were gross but still many were as funny as the published ones. I loved his introduction.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too many repetitive Q&A’s and not enough cartoons. But the cartoons were great.

[Colin Murtagh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do like my cartoons, whether it's Private Eye, or Oldie, or the New Yorker, it's an art form that, like the political cartoon, does seem to be dying out. This is a really good idea, but unfortunately it's badly executed.
Collected by a New Yorker Cartoonist, these are the cartoons which for one reason or another, didn't make it in to the magazine, and to be fair, it's not due to the quality. On the whole, the cartoons included here are of the sort of quality you would expect of the cartoonists represented, and to be fair there are a lot of big names in here.
There are however 3 problems with the book.
First off, on the kindle edition, the reproduction quality isn't of the best, and the captions for some of the cartoons end up on a different page. I can't see how that got through quality control before being released.
Secondly there are so many cartoonists involved that there are only a few cartoons from each cartoonist. It gives a flavour of each cartoonist, but I would have preferred more cartoons, which leads on to my most annoying problem.
Each cartoonist section starts off with a 4 page questionnaire, trying to be amusing, which, to be honest after about a dozen or so, i started skipping. If that had been cut down to a biography paragraph, then we could have done a lot more in the way of cartoons.

[Ingrid Stephens · Rating 3 out of 5]

307 cartoons that were rejected by The New Yorker magazine. I have always loved the small cartoons scattered around the New Yorker, they reminded me of when, I my youth, I read Mad magazine. In the margins are small cartoons that can be funny, political, even poignant. The cartoons in this collectionwerenot suitable for the New Yorker, and I read it because I wanted to know why.
I5 didn't take long to see why. Some, many actually, are sophomoric humor more fit for the 14 year old boy who loves Mad magazine.
I found a few of the cartoons funny in a grin to myself way, and a few are laugh out loud funny.
Unfortunately not as many of the 307 as I would have liked. With the exception of Graham Wilson, who I have always loved did much for me.
So these were rejected because they were gross, filthy, (way to many penis jokes for my taste), weird or just not funny.
Not my cup of tea,but I am sure some of you will love it, so check it out.
Thanks to @netgalley, Matt Diffee, and Workman Publishing Company

[Brett · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have this little writing exercise I do where I recaption New Yorker cartoons with bad taste and black humor jokes. While I didn't expect anything here to be that abrasive I did expect some content that was a little edgier, a little more groan-worthy, and definitely more stupid. It's also kind of interesting how this book doesn't work since I actually think the editorial department at the magazine does a pretty solid job with the cartoons. The repeated questions of the cartoonists are exhausting, and the answers are painfully and consistently hackey. These interviews feel like a third of the page count and actively work contrary to any value of the cartoons presented.

This was handed off to me by a pal trying to unload some books from his shelves and is now headed for one of those 'little lending libraries' you see here and there.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I laughed out loud occasionally, but the questionnaire was a bad idea

The idea for this book and its predecessor is fun. We get a selection of “rejected” cartoons by a whole bunch of New Yorker cartoonists, but they weren’t rejected because they aren’t funny; more like that they didn’t meet the magazine’s criteria. Nearly all of them ARE funny, including some real rib-ticklers. My problem with this book is that each cartoonist first answers a questionnaire, and the questions and answers are both highly repetitive from one cartoonist to the next.

[Daryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Are these cartoons too dumb, too dark, or too naughty? In most cases, yes, and that's what makes them so enjoyable. Some of them definitely fall flat, but quite a few made me laugh or at least smile or chuckle. The interviews with the cartoonists - in which they each answer the same set of questions, sometimes trying too hard to be funny - got really old really fast. (It's amazing how many answered the question "If you had a pen name, what would it be?" with a brand name of a type of pen used.)

[Ann Donegan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very funny book, especially liked the question and answer part; helped me feel like I knew the cartoonists. Great to read a few pages at a time, there was at least one cartoon in each section that made me laugh (or possibly snort) out loud. I can understand why they weren't published in The New Yorker, and glad they were published in this book. Good job, Diffee, no matter what the others say about you...

[Ms. Arca · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 or maybe a 4? It’s so cool to see a range of comics, and to read their responses to questions... clever, weird, and fun. You definitely get the feel of the comic community and that’s a sweet wacky space to be invited into through this book. I definitely laughed at a few of these and enjoyed this quirky collection.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like humor, and this was quite funny. I think that, at least sometimes, the rejected cartoons are funnier than the ones they accepted! In part because they're less mainstream. To be fair, I don't religiously follow New Yorker cartoons, so maybe this would be even funnier for people who do!

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Admittedly, I skipped over the intra-chapter information focusing on each of the cartoonists and just read the cartoons themselves. I chuckled once, smiled 2-3 times and...that's about it. There's a reason these weren't published in the first place whic, of course, is the danger of collections like these (and, for example, "bonus" materials you get on a movie DVD).

[Jess Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informative and funny

The author explains why they rejected the cartoons and each section talks about the creator of the cartoons. Some of the cartoons are face palms, others are funny and some we have to ask why. While others answer questions people don’t want to ask, but have thought about. Enjoy the humor and please be careful when facepalming yourself.

[Donna]

Yes, the book is meant to be funny, but it's also a serious read. Insights into the creative processes of dozens of cartoonists are sandwiched between pages of cartoons, making this an inspirational read.

[Becky Galambos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting collection of cartoons that were rejected by The New Yorker. Some were good but naughty, some were just, well...dumb. I enjoyed the interspersed interviews with questions and doodles by the various cartoonists.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actually really funny

These cartoons were rejected for a variety of reasons and many are really very funny. Besides the rejected cartoons, there are questions and answers for every cartoonist which are imaginative and also quite funny.

[Kbeckermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of fun, in particular the Q&A with the cartoonists. If you decide to pick this up, I recommend only looking at a few cartoonists each time you pick up, otherwise you run the risk of not looking at each cartoonist with fresh eyes (speaking from experience).

[Robyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mildly funny..skipped a bunch of the interviews because it got too repetitive.