Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cartoonists
When I was just a little tyke, perhaps four or five years old, I took pencil and drew a portrait of my baby brother. It was just a child's drawing, and it looked like a child's drawing. But my mother, bless her heart, must have been entertained because she kept that crude effort until the day she died. Not, I'm sure, because she thought she would eventually be able to bring it to auction at Sotheby's. Doting mother that she was she carefully tucked it away in my baby book.
And so ensued my long decline.
Every child, the experts say, has a precocious faculty for drawing. Parents BEWARE! Do not — under any circumstances, encourage your offspring in this direction.
Here is where the great danger lies. The child, the budding Rembrandt may, may I say; because nothing this side of the grave is certain. May find that on occasion he can amuse people with this incipient talent — curse is quite possibly a more accurate expression.
As a youngster the prodigy will very likely enjoy the admiration of his peers. Especially that he should make rude drawings of their teachers; or other figures in authority. ("Question authority!" cries the sophist. "Says who?" comes a voice from the back of the room.) I digress. An unfortunate failing of the mind.
So here he is, this facile limner of the grotesque, cozened in the languid evanescence of youth by the possibility of earning his bread and butter (and car payments), in the selling of *funny* drawings.
As the unformed humorist ascends gently into his majority, perceptions of his novel genius begin to shift. His inexperience in the ways of the world are always such that he remains unaware of this subtle transformation.
"You do what for a living?"
"C'mon! Cartoonist? You gotta be kidding me!" "Is there any money in that?" "You work at home? You call that working?" "Whyn't choo get a real job?" "Son, your Aunt Veronica wants to know if you have found useful employment yet." "etc." "etc." "etc."
Friends and relatives who lately found one's youthful exercises droll are now aggrieved and nonplussed. That a seemingly rational being would deliberately choose to waste time attempting to be funny for a living is beyond comprehension. The work of the world needed doing: Doctoring: Astronaugting: Ditch-digging.... Well! One might as well go into politics as be a cartoonist!
At parties it's, "How ya doin' Kiddo? Still burnin' up the ol' drawin' board? Har!" The whispers and sly hand shielding smiles follow an increasingly paranoid protagonist on his many trips to the drinks tray. "Well, my dear, he always was a bit, you know, odd..."
Perfect strangers cross the street and make rude gestures when he passes. Mortgage companies are just about to close when he calls, "Sorry!" Girls invariably have something else planned. Bus drivers want the bugger searched.
Mammas don't let your babies grow up to be cartoonists
Don't let 'em make drawings and drive them old trucks
Make 'em be doctors and lawyers and such...
(With apologies to Willie Nelson)
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