Letter to the Editor: The importance of humor

Forty. That is how many cartoons I’ve pitched. All forty of them (except for a few that didn’t make it to print, perhaps considered a bit too depraved) fill my room like a walk-in archive. Cartooning gives me the freedom to conflate the serious with the trivial, rendering the serious as more or less trivial at the inflection point of humor conceived as a thought experiment. I often position my cartoons at the crossroads of storytelling, humor and the mix of mundane in the crazy, the insanity in the ordinary; so naturally they end up a bit scathing but not explosive, witty but with just the right amount of kick (or not, and that’s okay too). Laughter can be a byproduct of humor, but it is not necessarily its end goal. Baudelaire said that laughter is natural to humans (he also said that it is satanic), and I think making fun of and being made fun of are essential to living. The Daily has given me the space to explore this aspect of living and the platform to cultivate my voice and experiment with styles (Mankoffian pointillism, not my forte; Venn diagrams, my forte). Fewer and fewer newspapers and magazines provide the real estate for cartoons even though the social commentaries they bring to the table are more pertinent now than ever. MAD folded last year, and the New York Times no longer publishes daily political cartoons in its international edition at a time when we especially need them for the sake of our collective sanity. I’d like to think that our campus newspaper and its cartoonists are doing their part in the greater discourse while tossing in a bit of humor as a treat.

Nasrin Lin, senior and Opinion cartoonist at the Daily