Each month in New York, cartoonists, comedians, and other humorists show off the work they did that no one wanted. They call it The Rejection Show.
THE NEW YORKER receives about 1,000 cartoon submissions a month and publishes perhaps 20.MATTHEW DIFFEE: So we're cartoonists at THE NEW YORKER, which sounds like a really good thing and a really cool gig, and it is, but there is a lot of rejection involved.
This is last week's reject. It's a restaurant, a fancy restaurant, and there is this announcement: "Will the owner of the black Humvee in the parking lot please get over themselves."
We go in every Tuesday with 10, 12 ideas, and on a really good week we sell one.
ABERNETHY: Matt has sold about 50 cartoons to THE NEW YORKER, where the average pay for a drawing is $675.
Before Matt became a cartoonist, he studied to be a missionary.
Mr. DIFFEE: I was in high school. I had a really tight group of friends that were all very serious about our Christianity and our faith. I did want to go into the ministry because I thought I would be a preacher, more specifically a missionary. That seemed cooler -- had an image, I think, of Indiana Jones with a Bible.
ABERNETHY: But Matt decided his greater gifts were as an artist who could make people laugh.
Mr. DIFFEE: It'll just be God sitting at a table sorting through two piles. I always get a lot of ideas on Tuesdays, because I'm kind of ramped up from getting my batch together. There is an In box and a Hell box. I'll probably do it for next week. It shows God sorting through piles, I guess just a pile, putting things in the In box or the Hell box. It's inappropriate; my mom won't like that. That's not going to sell, probably.Cartooning is pleasing to God because he gave me some skills and some talents and some interest in that department.
ABERNETHY: Matt grew up outside Dallas, the son of an airline pilot.
Mr. DIFFEE: Yeah, this is the family meeting, and the Dad is saying, "And before we begin this family meeting, what if we say our names and a little something about ourselves." He is not often at home.
My dad was a big influence in a lot of ways, just as far as being sort of an individual and a creative guy. My mother is very religious. I like the slippers on her feet; it's the kind of slippers my mom wore all her life. My mother is outwardly religious, socially religious. She's been in church all my life, and that's probably the biggest influence toward Christianity in my life.The Christianity that I grew up in is very Bible-based. The first, probably starting belief is that all of the Bible is completely inspired. It's actually kind of easy, in a way. You can just -- the Bible says it. There it is. I was real dogmatic about things when I was 17.
I did a cartoon of a church with a sign out in the front that says, "No shirt, no shoes, no salvation." It leans toward a deeper message about legalistic, fundamentalist churches that have confused the list of rules with Christianity.ABERNETHY: Matt graduated from South Carolina's fundamentalist Bob Jones University.
Mr. DIFFEE: I became a cartoonist by entering a contest. I was in Boston at the time, trying to make it as an abstract painter and peddling jokes occasionally to local comics. I don't know how many people entered it, but it is such a long shot. I believe in God, and I believe that he is in control of things, and I feel like he's on my side. So I do have a sense of optimism; in my core I have a sense of optimism about things and trying things and doing what I'm pretty sure I've been gifted to do. I ended up winning the contest, and Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor, met me then and encouraged me to start submitting, and I sold a cartoon in my first three weeks, which was very encouraging, and then I didn't sell another, I think, for eight months.
Mr. DIFFEE: So it's the dad, obviously the dad is taking care of the daughter for the night and she is saying: "Dad, Mom usually reads me a story and slips me a twenty." The kid's maybe trying to pull one over on dad, who doesn't know any better. I don't see how that has anything to do with religion.
Mr. DIFFEE: Cartooning is at a place where I enjoy it. In order to have your NEW YORKER cartoonist union card, you've got to do the classic psychiatrist couch gag: "Feelings of inadequacy are common among the inadequate."
