Somebody Moved My Bowl: The Genre of Couch Cartoons

But did you read the cartoons?

The habit of most readers of magazines with cartoons, such as The New Yorker and even Playboy, is to skim the text and read the cartoons first—forget for the time being “The Talk of the Town” or the latest fiction, the theater reviews or the centerfold (well, maybe). What provides more relief to daily life than a touch of humor, particularly humor akin to one's profession?

And for readers who happen to be psychoanalysts, the cartoons that grab their immediate attention are the simple couch cartoons—usually bearing the customary trademarks of a therapist (sometimes human, sometimes canine) in a chair and a patient (sometimes human, sometimes canine) on a couch, that symbolic confessional device.

“Couch cartoons are actually a cartoon genre, one of the archetypal classics just like the desert island gags that we all instantly understand visually. The couch plays the same repetitive role, but the humor is created in the gag line through the constancy and the reliability of the image of the couch combined with the freshness and quirkiness of a new and contemporary gagline. It is not enough to have a subject on the couch who is charming and adorable or a therapist who looks eccentric or remarkable. To make the cartoon work, it requires a combination of the familiar and the surprising,” remarked Playboy's esteemed cartoon editor, Michelle Urry, who has been at the magazine for 25 years in this capacity.

For a number of years, APsaA member Rosemary Cogan has followed the couch cartoons of one particular cartoonist, Charles Barsotti, who has published in Playboy as well as in The New Yorker. Cogan brought his work to the attention of Shrinkwatch and turned over her archives of Barsotti's couch cartoons, hoping that more APsaA members might come to know his work and enjoy his humor.

As a child, Barsotti grew up reading all the comics of his day, like Li'l Abner and Captain Marvel. He was smitten by the comic, the illustrative form of humor.

After a stint at Hallmark cards, Barsotti was hired by the old Saturday Evening Post, where he eventually became cartoon editor. When the Post folded (“sad day that”), Barsotti moved on to other magazines.

“It's the nature of a cartoonist to be observant,” Barsotti said recently during a phone interview from his home in Kansas City, Missouri. “I find it's best to start drawing and see where that exercise leads.” So he starts with a king, and moves on specifically to Albert the Great, a type of name most intriguing to him. Barsotti finds the notion of an adjective following a person's name quite humorous. The concept of “great” following Albert's name provokes Barsotti to put him on the couch, a place from which the King can confide his anxieties and troubles to his therapist.

“Many cartoonists are extremely neurotic, extremely angry and they work that out through their cartoons,” commented Urry. “But they make us laugh at ourselves in a benign way. Barsotti relies on the anthropomorphism of cartoons and that makes his work all the sillier and sweeter. He milks all his characters.”

In Barsotti's couch cartoons, dogs are just as valued as kings. One of Barsotti's personal favorites among his works is the cartoon in which the canine exclaims, “They moved my bowl” (this cartoon accompanies this article).

Dogs? Kings? What are Barsotti's cartoons really about? Shrinkwatch called upon a New York cartoonist for her perspective on Barsotti's work—a personage known to many APsaA members, the New York Times critic and reporter Sarah Boxer. She is also the author of In the Floyd Archives, a delightful book containing a series of cartoon case histories, essentially an animal tour of all things Freudian. Shrinkwatch shared with her the portfolio of Barsotti couch cartoons.

Boxer replied: “Does Barsotti have issues with loyalty? When he draws someone or something on the couch to be psychoanalyzed, it's usually a king (one who demands loyalty) or a dog (the ultimate loyalist). And the subject, drawn in a few simple, even lines, always lies stiffly on the couch, with feet pointing straight up. But despite the preponderance of kings and dogs, Barsotti's gag lines are surprisingly free of loyalty talk.”

Boxer continued:“The kings on the couch talk about not being truly loved or respected. They need to get rid of their defenses, their moats and drawbridges and reputations. The dogs have a touch of paranoia: Their dog dishes were moved, they hear high-pitched whistles, they think their masters are in a cult, or they fear jumping up on the analyst's couch. The kings and dogs are Everyman. Maybe that's why Barsotti rarely draws an ordinary man on the couch. He doesn't have to.”

For the past five years, The New Yorker has held a Cartoon Caption Contest. The most recent rendition of this competition introduced a new element as announced in a November 2003 issue—that of a variety of components that could be added to a basic Barsotti couch cartoon. The reader could cut out one or more of the figures, arrange them as he/she likes, write a caption, and mail The New Yorker the crafted cartoon.

The New Yorker then picked the best idea and Barsotti drew the cartoon. The winning cartoon was published in the January 26th magazine. As The New Yorker wrote in that issue:

For this year's cartoon-caption contest, we challenged our readers to make their own Charles Barsotti cartoon. Barsotti drew the basic setup—a therapist taking notes next to an empty couch—and then supplied characters who ranged from the conventional (man, woman) to the unconventional (squirrel, superhero), from the surreal (dragon, screwdriver) to favorites from the Barsotti oeuvre (king, dog). The task for readers was more difficult than in past years, but they responded with the same enthusiasm. In fact, something about the process of cutting, pasting, and designing an original piece of humorous artwork inspired the amateur cartoonists to new heights. Call it group therapy.

According to the contest's rules, the characters could be cut out and placed on the couch. Most readers went for a single-character setup, proposing self-hating dragons, sexually confused kings, and Oedipally conflicted dogs. Other readers left the couch blank, stacked all eight characters on top of one another, or performed cosmetic surgery (the squirrel, wearing the superhero's cape, became a flying squirrel; the woman, her hair painted with Wite-Out, became Barbara Bush). The squirrel was the least popular character; the most popular was the screwdriver, who was the source of numerous jokes about sex (captions too obvious to print), alcohol (“I don't even like vodka”), and general malaise (“I just don't know which way to turn”). More than a few readers mistook the screwdriver for a parking meter, and a couple even thought it was a guitar.

In the end, though, the best cartoons were those that combined this spirit of experimentation with the original mission of the contest: to create a genuine ersatz Barsotti cartoon, complete with psychological depth and poignant wit. In one of the entries that we selected as finalists, the superhero muses about his place in the world:“Sometimes I think everybody'd be better off if I was a bird or a plane” (Kip Conlon, of Brooklyn). In another, the king complains to the therapist, “Mom always liked you best” (June Anderson and Dr. Alice McKay, of Henderson, Nevada).

The winning entry was created by Danial Adkison, of Brooklyn, who received a version of his cartoon drawn by Charles Barsotti.

“I can smell my own fear.” was the caption.

Couch cartoonists projecting their observations of ordinary man through comic scenes, comic characters, even through comic animals, using the device of the couch, the device of the confession to therapist. Somebody moved my bowl. The shrink in popular culture thrives.

[Editor's Note: TAP thanks The New Yorker for permitting us to reprint its article and also Playboy magazine and The Cartoon Bank () for allowing the reprint of the cartoons in this issue of TAP.]