New Yorker staff cartoonist David Sipress joins us this morning to discuss, What’s So Funny, an evocative family memoir, a love letter to New York City, and an exploration of the origins of creativity.
Sipress writes about being a budding young cartoonist and his Upper West Side Jewish family in the age of JFK and Sputnik. As a dreamer and obsessive drawer, goes hazy when it comes to the ceaselessly imparted lessons-on-life from his father, the meticulous, upwardly mobile proprietor of Revere Jewelers, and in the face of the angsty expectations of his migraine-prone mother.
With self-deprecation, wit, and artistry, Sipress paints his hapless place in his indelibly dysfunctional family, from the time he was tricked by his unreliable older sister into rocketing his pet turtle out his twelfth-floor bedroom window, to the moment he walks away from a Harvard PhD program in Russian history to begin his journey as a professional cartoonist.