Who Ordered the Special Prosecutor?: A Portrait of Liza Donnelly
by Mary Leonard

A funny woman lives in Rhinebeck. No, she does not wear outrageous hats, nor does she do stand-up comedy in front of the Beekman Arms. Liza Donnelly is an attractive and unassuming woman who has been creating cartoons weekly for the New Yorker since the early 80s.

Donnelly sold her first cartoon to the New Yorker in 1979 but it was not published until 1982. Since then she has been a regular contributor. The New Yorker wants cutting edge humor, visuals and captions with social commentary and Donnelly tries to do that. She admits it's sometimes difficult to intuit the fine line between what will work and what might be over the top. After the World Trade Center disaster, Donnelly published a cartoon of a little girl who says to her father, "Daddy can I stop being worried now?" This cartoon, as difficult as it was to create, is one Donnelly is most proud of.

In 2000 Signe Wilkinson, a fellow female cartoonist, invited Donnelly to be on a panel at the annual cartoonist convention in Tennessee. When Donnelly looked out at the audience, she saw a sea of men. She had known for some time that cartooning was a man's world. At this virtually all-male convention it really hit home and in her speech, Donnelly finally broached the question: 'Why are there so few women in cartooning?' This question and event became the genesis for her book, Funny Ladies: The New Yorker's Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons, which will be due out from Prometheus Books in October.

The New Yorker was founded in 1925 by Harold Ross intentionally as a humor magazine, but has evolved to include the best writing available, from nonfiction investigative articles to poetry. The cartoon, however, has remained a consistent feature. Although many other books have been published about the humor in the New Yorker, none have specifically touched on the history of women cartoonists.

In researching the women cartoonists of the NewYorker, Donnelly especially fell in love with Barbara Shermund, whose cartoons were popular in the 20s and 30s. When Donnelly googled Shermund's name, she could not find anything about her except for an art gallery on the coast of New Jersey, which featured her work. Because of Donnelly's detective work, she was able to locate the woman who bought Shermund's estate, including all of Shermund's artwork and papers. As Donnelly admitted, "it was a gold mine," and a rich resource for Donnelly's research. What attracted Donnelly to Shermund was that she was "spunky." She was also independent, says Donnelly, and had a rare ability to poke fun at men while also making fun of her own feminist attitudes. Shermund, who also always wrote her own captions, was ahead of her time in initiating gender issue humor and even drawing cartoons around the subject of homosexuality.

Shermund mirrored life for women in the city in the 20s and 30s, and Donnelly found her feminist viewpoint unique for that period. Donnelly discovered that during the 50s and 60s, cartoons about women returned to more traditional subjects; in the 50s women cartoonists actually disappeared from the magazine. It was not until the feminist movement became strong in the 70s and innovators like Nurit Karlin, Roz Chast, and Donnelly herself began appearing steadily that cartoons by women began to return to the pages of the magazine.

Donnelly submits between three to six cartoons a week but says that some cartoonists submit up to 12. When she lived in Manhattan, she would submit her cartoons on Wednesday, pick up her work a week later and traipse around to the other magazines trying to sell the leftovers. Now she only works for the New Yorker and draws and writes for their editorial needs. In order to generate ideas, Donnelly likes to be current with trends and social issues and even something as mundane as the seasons. Since Donnelly and her husband Michael Maslin, a fellow cartoonist, both work at home, Donnelly has been able to observe the difference in their processes. Her husband can amuse himself for hours with his drawings before he comes up with the actual cartoon. But Donnelly asks herself, "What do I want to say and why do I want to say it?" She did not want to generalize about gender differences just from these two examples but she has noticed that she is definitely more pragmatic. Even when she is stuck, she knows how to break through the block. She thumbs through the dictionary and newspapers looking for words that might strike her visual funny bone. Two of the cartoons that originally appeared in the New Yorker and are included in Funny Ladies do just that that. Both are centered on an ironic treatment of language: the words feminist and special prosecutor. For her cartoon about a special prosecutor, see below.

When Donnelly was young, she drew cartoons, but was primarily interested in animals and wanted to be another Jane Goodall. In fact she started her college career majoring in biology, before switching to art. Her first employment was working in the art department at the Museum of Natural History, which combined her two loves. After she married Maslin, who was living in Kingston at the time, he introduced her to Rhinebeck. Donnelly announced, "I want to live here someday." They moved to Rhinebeck in 1988 to raise their two daughters and to renew Donnelly's connection to nature. Donnelly, Maslin and their daughters now have three dogs, three cats and two horses on their small plot of land. Donnelly enjoys riding but is the only one in the family who does, although everyone in the family loves living in the country. However, Donnelly, Maslin and their daughters maintain a connection to "the city" where they go twice monthly for plays and to visit museums and galleries. Besides working as a cartoonist, Donnelly is a visual artist, painting mostly abstract works that have been exhibited at the Woodstock Artist's Association and the Tivoli Artists' Coop.

Will Donnelly ever produce cartoons about nature, animals or even Rhinebeck? Maybe someday, but not for the New Yorker. The country is not the inspiration for her work, but the place for replenishment. She loves Poets' Walk and the area's proximity to the Hudson and history. Donnelly may not be Ellen DeGeneres or Phyllis Diller but the public will have a chance to meet this funny lady, at talks and book signings in the area this fall.