A cartoon character

New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff will speak in Boston next week.

According to New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff, 98 percent of the magazine's readers claim to look at the cartoons first - and the other 2 percent lie. He should know. After 500 submissions, Mankoff sold his first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1977, beginning a fertile relationship with the periodical that built its comic reputation on the work of Charles Addams, James Thurber, and Saul Steinberg, among others. Mankoff also runs the magazine's Cartoon Bank, wrote "The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity," and created the magazine's caption contest, a feature that draws thousands of submissions each week. On Tuesday he'll give a talk titled "Laughing Matters: New Yorker Cartoons and Jewish Humor" at Temple Israel in Boston, sponsored by the New Center for Arts and Culture.

Q. What's made the magazine such a showcase for cartoonists?

A. The New Yorker is to cartooning what God is to religion. It didn't completely invent it, but it's the Holy Grail. The cartoons are right there in our pages, next to John Updike and A.J. Liebling, not simply as comic relief but as a humorous, messier vision of life, as opposed to the more rational vision.

Q. How was the tradition established?

A. The people who started The New Yorker came out of a comic tradition created by magazines like Punch. By the 1930s a classic template had been worked out, using words and gags to illuminate the times. One example was the 1993 cartoon that read, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."

Q. What about poking fun at, say, economic Armageddon?

A. Well, we have a cartoon anthology coming out, "On the Money," that looks at issues like the stock market and personal finance since 1925, year by year.

Q. If anyone has any money left, it should sell like hotcakes.

A. Yes, although the hotcakes industry is going down the tubes, too. The United States now outsources all its hotcakes.

Q. Do you personally wade through the caption contest entries?

A. A computer program sorts them out, then my assistant gives me 50 or 60, broken into categories. For example, we ran a cartoon of a car that had crashed into a room where two people are in bed. Categories might include Bad Sex and Kid Coming Home. I'll pick three entries and send them to [editor] David Remnick for approval. I try to pick from different ones, like, "I thought our sex life was a train wreck, not a car accident." And, "Well, at least he made curfew." But it's very subjective.

Q. What will your Boston talk focus on?

A. Partly how the magazine has looked at different ethnic groups over the years. Jokes in the '20s and '30s might seem anti-Semitic today, for instance, but really weren't. Like the lawyer who says, "My client would like to change his name from Trelawny to Goldstein for purposes of commerce."