For more than fifty years, the artist George Booth has drawn cartoons and covers for The New Yorker, filling the magazine with surly partygoers, caterwauling Santas, and cantankerous country folk sitting on porches. Booth’s cats and dogs are lovable troublemakers, at least when their owners aren’t torturing them with music. In 2001, a drawing inspired by his mother was the only cartoon in the issue that followed the attacks of September 11th. Now ninety-five, Booth is the oldest cartoonist still contributing to the magazine, a distinction celebrated on Thursday as part of The New Yorker Live, the virtual event series exclusively for subscribers.
“After high school, I didn’t get college. I was being drafted and going in the Marine Corps,” Booth recounts in “Drawing Life,” a short film about his career that screened during the online event. “I put in almost eight years of active. They were an education. They were an art school for me.”
As Booth and his admirers note in the film, and in the discussion that followed, neither the cartoonist nor his illustrated subjects are an obvious match for The New Yorker. Born and raised in small-town Missouri—“corn country,” in his words—Booth published some of his earliest professional cartoons in Leatherneck, a magazine for members of the Marine Corps. Booth was already in his mid-forties when his work first appeared in The New Yorker, and he brought to its pages many of the characters and settings from his decidedly non-urban youth: farm fields and scarecrows, snarky comments made on those aforementioned porches.
Following the film, the latest in the New Yorker Documentary series, the magazine’s cartoon editor, Emma Allen, hosted a discussion about Booth’s distinguished career with some of his fellow-cartoonists: Mort Gerberg, a longtime friend of Booth’s and a relative spring chicken at age ninety, and, representing younger generations of New Yorker contributors, Emily Flake and Jeremy Nguyen. In the clip above, you can view highlights from the conversation, which covered topics such as the body language of Booth’s subjects, his penchant for lengthy captions, and the panelists’ personal touchstones among his cartoons.
The full discussion is available on demand for subscribers, along with all previous episodes of The New Yorker Live. To gain access, subscribe today; to purchase a limited-edition hoodie featuring one of Booth’s famous cartoon dogs, visit The New Yorker Store.
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