Good-bye, Bud Handelsman

J. B. Handelsman

From The New Yorker:

The cartoonist J. B. Handelsman—John Bernard at birth, and Bud thereafter—died last week, at the age of eighty-five, leaving a legacy of nearly a thousand New Yorker cartoons (and five covers), published between 1961 and last fall.

I have been reading and enjoying Handelsman's cartoons throughout the whole of his time at the magazine. He was funny, but with a bite.

He wasn’t a polemicist, but his work was concerned with politics and history and the range of our folly, from mere foibles to gross inhumanity. “Sometimes something historical gives you a better perspective,” he said in a 1980 interview. “You can see the latest dumbness as just the end of a long line of dumbnesses that have been taking place for thousands of years."

Depending on your point of view, whether you look at a glass as half-full or half-empty, his words can lead to hope and encouragement or to deep despair. "The latest dumbness" which we see so plainly today, is nothing new, but comes from "a long line of dumbnesses."

He was angry about many things, unfairness and hypocrisy being very near the top of the list. In a cartoon from fifteen years ago, Handelsman drew the Statue of Liberty lifting her torch in one hand and holding a portable phone with the other. Into the phone she says, skeptically, “Well, it all depends. Where are these huddled masses coming from?”

What a mockery we make of the words on the Statue of Liberty today, what hypocrisy, but consider that the cartoon is fifteen years old. Consider that dumbness and hypocrisy are older than history.

Rest in peace, Bud.