Orson Welles, Jack Handey and God.

I don’t like aphorisms. Maxims, mottos, you name it. “Forget aphorisms,” I say, a little adage of mine. The problem is that I’m terribly inconsistent. As a cartoonist and as a person, just sloppy, volatile guy, capable of contradicting opinions in the same thought. I’m that kind of idiot who will hear two sides of an argument and just go with the last one they heard. The aphorism I hate the most is “know thyself.” How can I know thyself? My personality is shifting constantly! I contain multitudes! It’s all about context! There is no “thy” to self-know!

Or maybe none of that is true. I don’t know. I suppose there are some broad personality traits stuck within me, desperate to escape, doomed to an existence of having to deal with me all day. I suppose I can be summed up. Not by Myers-Briggs though, that’s bunk. I’ll die on that hill.

So no adages for me, but I’ll tell you what, there are quotes that stick with me. Things that I have heard and can’t stop thinking about. They pop up a lot in my head, as I navigate my career and life. The thing about quotes is, they’re messier, with more room for interpretation. In this regard, I can apply them to my life as I see fit, they can even change as I do!

There are three in particular, they’re all different kinds of quotes, and none of them have much to do with one another. So I’m gonna share them.

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The first quote is: “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” I don’t know where I first heard this, but I have heard it attributed to Orson Welles. After a little research, I can confirm that a primary source of this quote comes from Welles in a 1992 essay titled “The Independent Filmmaker” by Henry Jaglom for the collection “The Movie Business Book.”

Tell you what, I love that quote. People think, well, true creativity must come out of thin air, you can think up anything from nothing. I tell you it ain’t so. You absolutely need limitations to start anything creative.

Welles was specifically referring to financial limitations in that quote, finding creative ways to shoot scenes on a smaller budget. But I tend to think of this quote broadly, throughout every facet of my drawing process. For instance, I cannot start drawing on a blank page. Every cartoon I draw starts on this template:

It’s sort of a half-assed rule of thirds grid but I cannot start drawing without it. I have used this grid from my very first cartoon, and have no intention of ditching it. I need something, anything there, before I start sketching. It limits me, you see, to the boundaries, more or less. It reminds me of the overall proportions of the toon and guides the composition.

This also applies to idea generation. When I started working on my pickleball book, I had to come up with a ton of pickleball-related cartoons. I have been asked, multiple times, if this was hard. In fact, it was much easier than coming up with five cartoons for a weekly batch. With the pickleball book I had a starting point: pickleball. From there all I had to do was combine it with a trope, or emotion, or historical period or whatever. Pickleball + Desert island, pickleball + therapy, pickleball + medieval king, etc. The limitation of topic brought the assignment into focus, and the cartoons came fast.

The next quote I think about is from an 2013 interview with comedy writer Jack Handey in Esquire. The Interviewer asks him: “Do you think silliness is not something that's openly accepted in American humor?” Handey responds:

This quote sticks in my brain because I have encountered this myself. I draw silly cartoons for a living, and 99% of the feedback is positive, but boy, sometimes my work will just piss someone off. I’m not complaining here, like I said, most comments on my work are very nice, okay maybe I’m complaining a little, because you don’t remember the nice comments, you remember the MEAN and ANGRY ones, and you DWELL on them, letting them SEEP into your psyche, keeping you AWAKE at night.

Usually I can figure out the anger, like say if the perspective of the cartoon isn’t aligning with a particular viewer. But sometimes I can’t figure it out. Sometimes someone will just get angry at a cartoon for no reason, and when that happens I think about that quote. I’m not talking about pedantry, although that happens too, and I’m not talking about ‘not getting it.’ This anger appears when someone fully understands the cartoon and is irked by just how plain dumb it is.

I can’t relate to this at all. I love silly. I love stupid. LOVE it. I love Jack Handey! Deep Thoughts was a huge influence on my humor. So I suppose that these angry comments are a badge of honor, even if they keep me up at night. Anyway, here’s a very dumb cartoon of mine that has drawn some inexplicable ire:

Okay this third quote is going to shock you because, get this: it’s scripture. Now, I’m not a religious man by any means, I ain’t spiritual and as I mentioned last week, I fear the endless void that awaits us after death. But, this part from Exodus, which I probably first heard as a kid in Hebrew school, sticks with me: “The Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart.”

The context is, Moses has told Pharaoh to let the Jews leave Egypt, out of slavery. Pharaoh says no way, God releases ten plagues on the Egyptians, Pharaoh gives in and allows them to leave. However, at the last second, right after they have left, Pharoah changes his mind and goes after them. But he didn’t really change his mind, God changed it for him.

I’m not a Bible scholar. Apparently this phrase pops up on several occasions in Exodus, and I’m sure there’s many different ways people have translated and interpreted it. What I’m going to do is explain what it means to me, how I think about it. I remember when I first heard it, I was sort of blown away. Like, why? Classic first testament God, real dick move for no reason.

But when I started to think about the passage as metaphor, this concept really stuck with me. It’s about stubbornness. It’s about being compelled, without knowing why, to make bad choices, governed by spite or sadness or most of all, insecurity. When all you want to do is give in, when you should give in, but you can’t allow yourself to do it. I can relate to this! Who can’t?

There are extreme examples of this. When I read stories about young men being pulled into the toxic manosphere, their worst instincts encouraged and celebrated, I think of this quote. It’s not God who is hardening their hearts, but it is a force within themselves that’s being fed by creeps, grifters and bad actors. The stubbornness of hatred takes over, a blanket of false strength that condemns empathy as weakness and continuously poisons the soul.

Sorry about that! I normally keep it light around here. So on that particular downer note, I’m gonna end this weeks newsletter with one more gentle reminder to subscribe if you haven’t, and have yourself a solid day.

Thanks for reading!