Nudity! Scatology! Blasphemy! Bestiality! It's all here in Matthew Diffee's perverse and wonderful The Best of the Rejection Collection: 297 Cartoons That Were Too Dark, Too Weird, or Too Dirty for 'The New Yorker.' This second iteration of the book, which features some new cartoons and contributors, offers both amusement and, for readers who keep failing to make it into the cartoon caption contest at the New Yorker, the comfort of knowing that numerous crackerjack cartoonists have also been spurned by the magazine.
Diffee--a New Yorker contributor since 1999, who estimates that "we cartoonists are lucky if they take one of the ten ideas we pitch each week"--launches The Best of the Rejection Collection with an overview of his creative process and a list of reasons why his work may have been rejected. For example, "too goofy" is one explanation for the nixing of his illustration of a crudely drawn wheeled vehicle above the caption "horse-drawn carriage." For the main event, Diffee (Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People) conducts q&as with 54 New Yorker cartoonists and follows each exchange with samples of the artist's rejected work. The surprise here isn't how funny these works are--in a cartoon by Jason Patterson, a pantsless man enters a restaurant whose window bears the sign "NO SHIRT/ NO SHOES/ NO SERVICE"--but it's how relentlessly entertaining the cartoonists are in the q&as. Leo Cullum has the best answer to the question "how do you deal with rejection?" when he responds, "I find someone to publish a book of rejected cartoons." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer