Book Review: The New Yorker Book of Technology Cartoons

The New Yorker Book of Technology Cartoons

Edited by Robert Mankoff

The New Yorker is known for many things, but being on the cutting edge of new technology is not one of them. Still, this collection delivers some good laughs at the expense of the tech industry and the people from all walks of life who have found themselves unable to live without the latest gadget.

Some of these cartoons, first collected at the height of the dot com bubble, are quite dated at this point. Others have become obvious in our email/text society. But a number of them are truly timeless.

The artwork and style of humor is classic New Yorker, and the humor is almost always focused on the people rather than the gadgets. There is the typical quirky wit and charm that you would expect from the New Yorker. The jokes are aimed at technological laypersons. This is not like XKCD or some of the other webcomics that can appeal to a highly specialized audience that appreciates, say, jokes written in Linux code. This is humor for the casual internet user, the person who can't set their VCR but might be able to operate Tivo with a bit of handholding.

The cartoonists represented in this collection include Charles Barsotti, Zack Ziegler, Tom Cheney, Mick Stevens, Marisa Acocella, Alex Gregory, Frank Cotham and others. There are 110 cartoons included in this book, which also comes packaged with all of the cartoons in CD-Rom format, just to show that the artists and editors of the New Yorker are comfortable with embracing technology even as they are mocking it.

The New Yorker Book of Technology Cartoons was book #8 in my goal of reading 50 books in 2009.