Throughout the day, New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff jots down ideas that strike him as funny: A door lies on a couch in a psychiatrist's office, and the psychiatrist says, "You're not crazy, you're just unhinged." Or, two guys crawling through a desert encounter one of those orange cones that says: "Caution Wet Floor." For a man obsessed with humor, Mankoff found the perfect job — he's served for 20 years as the magazine's cartoon gatekeeper. He's stepping down from his post in May, but will continue to draw his own cartoons. Mankoff has spent decades thinking about what makes things funny, and has even taught college courses on the subject. Over the years he has edited cartoonists with different styles, but he thinks of his own style as intellectual, drawing heavily on personal experience. "My targets are either myself, or people like me," he says. "I don't punch down, I don't punch up, I elbow to the side." Mankoff's most famous cartoon shows a man in a suit standing at a desk,
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