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Vice Blog

Literary - Rejected New Yorker Cartoons

About the only thing lamer than the formulaic half-jokes most New Yorker cartoons rely on are folks who think it's clever to point them out and craft little "ideal New Yorker cartoon jokes"--wait, no, what's worse are those people who make zany, new captions. Basically what we're getting after is their cartoons have reached such a depth of prolonged sucking that even trying to make fun of them just draws you down into its little gravity well, so we figured this book of ones they turned down was similarly going to blow. Wrong-o. Apparently the heights of blandness achieved by the ones they do run have a lot less to do with the cartoonists sucking than with them tossing out anything that could possibly offend anyone anywhere. Not everything in it's a gutbuster, but just glancing through this elicited waay more laughs than anything we've ever seen in an actual issue. Here are a few quick faves, but you should check out the whole thing. We're gussing they've got it at bookstores.

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As said, they're not all gold. Most of the attempts at sex jokes feel like someone's mom trying to do cartoons for Penthouse.