There will be upwards of forty thousand runners in the New York City Marathon. The race will be filled with people from every walk of life running the streets of New York. But I doubt that there will be many cartoonists. As a mainly sedentary species, cartoonists are not known for physical prowess. Oh yes, Jack Ziegler once single-handedly lifted an object that usually requires two hands, and Roz Chast is a renowned mixed-martial-arts cage fighter, but they are the exceptions. Case in point: today’s guest blogger, the New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro. Take it away, Tom.
Running a marathon is many things. Exhilarating. Grueling. Sometimes even doable. One thing it most certainly is not, however, is funny. Unless you think that nipple chafe is funny.
This puts me, a cartoonist who also runs marathons, in a bit of a quandary. Why should I go trotting around my neighborhood in skivvies for hours and hours when I ought to be hunched over my drawing table cranking out gags? A good idea almost never comes to me when I’m training. The mood isn’t right. I feel too damn healthy—not the condition to inspire biting satire.
Maybe Kim Warp is right.
Balling up pieces of paper and tossing them on the floor is just about all the stamina our job requires. That’s why we prefer to observe the race (rat, foot, or otherwise) from an ironic distance, preferably from inside a warm café.
And from this vantage, voilà! A fitness buff’s article of clothing suddenly transforms into Matthew Diffee’s comedic gold.
I laugh. I cringe. The athlete in me blushes while the cartoonist in me smirks.
Give and take. Yin and yang. Jester and butt.
Don’t all human endeavors have a degree of absurdity? Even the most Ancient Greece-y ones? Our time on earth is finite, so why waste it running errands, let alone a marathon? The distance itself—26.2 miles—is only slightly less cockamamie than pi. What does it measure in the grand scheme of things? Why wake up at 5:30 A.M. to pull on those smelly old sneakers, stumble outdoors into the frigid autumn air, and jog down the same empty streets over and over and over again?
Why, Bob Mankoff, why?
For me the answer is simple. I’m petty. I want to win the silliest of prizes, to hold the most arbitrary of stats. You’ve probably guessed it by now: I hope to break the New Yorker Cartoonist Marathon Record.
It’s currently held by none other than the editor himself, Mr. Robert T. Mankoff. The wisdom of trying to beat a man who single-handedly controls my career is iffy, I’ll grant you. But Bob is like a father figure to us younger cartoonists, and he’s also read Freud. So we’re cool.
His fastest time is a daunting 3:03:14, posted in 1973.
My personal best pales in comparison—a mere 3:26:08. Or, to put a rosier spin on it, I hold a Paul Ryan-adjusted time of 2:15 flat. (Outdated Paul Ryan slam!)
Now for the anticlimax: I won’t be running in tomorrow’s New York City Marathon. Various reasons, like not planning to, prevent me. However, you can bet that I will toe the line somewhere soon, and hopefully I’ll survive to laugh about it afterward. Because in the long run it isn’t what place you finish that matters—as shown by Zachary Kanin—it’s living to tell the tale. And the joke.
Thanks, Tom. And remember, as Damon Runyon remarked, “The race is not always to the swift, but that’s the way to bet.”
