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 could wake up and never have another idea," says Roz Chast. Unlikely, since Chast has been a cartoonist for the New Yorker and other publications since 1978, but such is life for someone who channels anxiety for a living. Chast's squiggly-lined drawings depict domestic scenes that have changed along with her life; while her early work reflected life in the city, her more recent cartoons are about family life in the suburbs. Her jokes make light of people's insecurities about appearance, relationships, moneymaking, parenting. According to Chast, her work comes from the place where anxiety and hilarity intersect. In "Mental Baggage Claim," unremarkable characters stand in the airport watching suitcases roll past. A thought bubble attached to a middle-aged man says, "Excuse me, I think I see my resentment of physical beauty." A woman thinks, "Those lifelong regrets about stopping ballet when I was ten? Those are mine." Chast has recently published Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, Health-Inspected, a compilation of over 500 cartoons from her twenty-eight year career. Hooksexup spoke to the artist from her home in Connecticut. — Sarah Harrison
How did you learn to draw? You know little kids just draw all the time? I just didn't stop. It was just kind of a gradual evolution, like handwriting. I can remember being in grade school and looking at some girl's drawing and saying, "Oooh, I like the way she draws shoes. I'm gonna take that. So, you know, it's a little bit of that, and a little bit of how you naturally draw. Speaking of kids, what do yours think of your cartoons? I think they get a kick out of it. My daughter's having some issues with math right now, and I have mixed feelings about those cartoons now, because she was just telling me, "Mom, I fell off the math cliff." It's really weird when you have a kid in high school and they're starting to ask you questions about why they have to learn about cosines. You just feel like the biggest hypocrite on earth. What kind of fan mail do you get? I used to get more, before email and computers. Most of it is from rational, nice people. But just last week I got three biblical tracts, for no reason. I think it's not personally me. It's possible that they just picked ten people at random from the New Yorker table of contents. Somebody from Indonesia sent me this wonderful statue. I can't remember the name for it, but it's like a guardian spirit. The person who sent it to me said, "This character looks like one of your characters," and it does. It has this funny expression on its face. He advised me to put it in a high place, so I have it on a high shelf in my studio. People put them in trees so they can look down on them. How autobiographical is your work? It's a mix of a lot of things. You know, some of it is more specifically autobiographical, some of it is pretty general, some of it is stuff I made up totally. Does writing personal cartoons ever make you feel overly exposed? No, not yet. Unless you're writing some weird fantasy thing about dragons in the Middle Ages or something, there's always that risk. You think, "Oh, is this too personal?" Especially with humor, which is a little aggressive. It's like, "Ha ha ha. Something you did or said, I find amusing, and maybe you don't."
The New York Times described you as "chronically anxious." I get myself wound up about things. Sometimes I look back on it and can't believe I got that wound up about it. It's an ongoing sort of situation, listening to that little voice inside your head that replays things over and over until you find exactly the spot that's going to make you most uncomfortable. Like I'll probably replay this conversation in my head and think, like, "Uh, huh." I've been trying to figure out your sense of humor. Oh, you know what E.B. White said about analyzing humor. "It's like dissecting a frog. Nobody is much interested and in the end, the frog dies." In the introduction to you book, David Remnick says you defy the conventions of what is funny. What do you think he meant by that? I have no idea. What is conventionally funny? People falling down stairs? Well, that can be very funny. When you watch sitcoms or, I hate to say it, but a lot of comic strips in newspapers, there's a certain rhythm that might as well be a laugh track there. They're telling you, "This is going to be a joke. . . jokes are coming. . . here's a joke!" And I can't stand that. I can't, can't, can't bear it. Do you watch The Office, the British one? Oh my God, well, I have seen it, but it's very difficult for me to watch. I have friends who feel the same way about it. The same thing with Curb Your Enthusiasm. They say "I can't stand it," it doesn't seem funny or it's just too cringey. I love that. Humor is so subjective. I could watch the same episode [of Curb Your Enthusiasm or The Office] over and over rather than watch most sitcoms, which make me want to lie down and not get up again. I watched your interview with Steve Martin where you talked a lot about inanimate objects. What is it about inanimate objects that you like? They're fun to draw, and they're kind of, I don't know, some of them are kind of anthropomorphic. What else do you like to draw? I like drawing interiors, I like drawing people. I don't like drawing trees particularly. I like drawing tea sets. I like drawing machinery. I like drawing the backs of television sets because you can put all these lines and dials in there and make it look like you really know what's going on back there. But really, I have no idea. Some of your cartoons are about poetry and poets. Do you write poetry? [laughs] No. Only what you see in the cartoon. I think there's something about poetry which seems even more hopeless than being a cartoonist. How long does it take you to write a cartoon? It really varies. Occasionally there's a cartoon that kind of comes all at once, I can see it, it's kind of clear. And there are other ones that take days and days and days. How many things are you working on at any one time? Every week the New Yorker has a weekly art meeting. I'm always working on what we call "the batch," which is the group of cartoons we submit every week. We usually submit anywhere from five to fifteen. I'm usually on the lower end of that, about seven or so, because some of mine are kind of long. And then I'm usually working on a book or two, and then a project that I'm fooling around with for no particular reason. What's your day like?
The New York art meeting is on Wednesday, so Mondays and Tuesdays are pretty intensive batch days for me, although I usually have some ideas that I've written down during the week. Sometimes not. Wednesday is my Sabbath. After Monday and Tuesday I need a little break , unless there's a deadline that has to be dealt with. And then I'm working on illustration projects, or book projects, or doing finishes — if the New Yorker buys the drawing, I get to re-draw it and make it better. This week they bought a drawing and the sketch, of course, was black and white and pretty loose and all patchy and weird and messy. I re-draw it in pencil, and then I ink it, and then there's color. If it's a current thing, they might get it on Friday or Thursday, and it might be in the issue that hits the stands on Monday. But sometimes they might hang on to it for weeks or months, or even years. Do you feel competitive with the other New Yorker cartoonists? To some extent, there is that aspect of it. We all know that there's between fifteen and twenty places for cartoons in the magazine, and they get hundreds and hundreds of submissions every week. I don't think about that a whole lot. Well, you're so established. I don't know whether it's part of the psyche of most cartoonists or just a reflection of the reality that none of us are really established. Editors change, and if they don't like you then that's the end of that. And also you could wake up one day and never have another idea again. Or they could decide that they've totally been kidding themselves about you and say "You know what, she really sucks. She's terrible." There are all these things to consider. So, established? I don't think any of us ever really feel that way. You've done a lot of "mixed marriage" cartoons — where did that idea come from? The phrase "mixed marriage" usually refers to Judeo-Christian marriages, although I feel like all marriages are mixed marriages. Even same-sex marriages, you've got two people. You've got this idea that you're supposed to form a union, and it's not easy. What religion were you raised with? My parents were both Jewish, but I wasn't raised in any particular way. My husband is Protestant. I'm mildly curious about religion but also a little cautious, because it does seem like when people get into it, a lot of more trouble comes out of it than good. He's more anti-religion than me. He was made to go to church. He didn't want our kids to be indoctrinated. The last cartoon in the book shows you at age nine reading books about horrible diseases. What appealed to you about those? Well, it's again one of these things where anxiety and hilarity. . . well, maybe it's not very funny at the time. It's kind of horrible at the time. I really did think that at any moment all my teeth could fall out of my head. I wouldn't even have to cross my eyes for them to get stuck cross-eyed, they could just suddenly cross by themselves! [laughs] And I'd walk around with crossed eyes for the rest of my life! n°
©2007 hooksexup.com and Sarah Harrison. 
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