Four a.m. is a productive hour for cartoonist Paul Noth.
Whether he’s awake and wired or asleep and lost in dreams, some ineffable magic unfolds for him in the blurry hours that straddle late night and early morning.
Noth, 51, found himself wrestling with an idea after watching Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention in July. After tuning in for the better part of an hour, Noth “stopped because that speech was just endless,” says Noth, who lives in South Milwaukee. “Then, I found myself waking up at 4 in the morning, and I was, like, ‘I gotta draw that.’ ”
Noth drew an image of Trump speaking to a crowd while two political aides confer in the wings. The caption reads: “The first few minutes were coherent, but he recovered nicely.”
The drawing was selected as The New Yorker’s daily, topical cartoon and ran in the magazine’s newsletter that day.
“Paul consistently manages to come up with a joke that has a point of view but is subtle and surprising,” says Emma Allen, The New Yorker’s cartoon editor. “He has proven that there is always a new and powerful way to satirize people who are saying and doing insane things.”
Noth hopes to find more such material at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Finding an original angle inside a media fishbowl is no easy feat for a cartoonist. The competition includes daily headlines, late-night talk-show hosts and an Internet’s worth of funny people.
Since 2004, Noth has been churning out 10 jokes a week on a semi-regular basis for The New Yorker, which makes his accomplishment seem nothing less than Herculean.
In the bizarre cinematic universe of American politics, Noth stands among a rarefied few who can digest the news each day and translate it into single, incisive observations that resonate instantly.
“What makes a daily cartoon a winner is when it’s not reiterating our fatigue but somehow energizes readers for the 30 seconds it takes them to read it,” Allen says.
A switch from comedy writing
Growing up, Noth never expected to work as a comic artist. Despite an early obsession with comics and cartoons — he spent countless hours drawing in notebooks and poring over the Milwaukee Journal — he says he didn’t seriously consider it as a career.
“My dad told me not to go into print media,” Noth says, laughing, reflecting on his father’s career as a newspaper film critic. “He saw journalism as a dying industry. So I wrote it off as a profession.”
Noth pursued creative writing at Emerson College in Boston and eventually moved to New York to explore a career in comedy writing.
But he says he never stopped drawing. It wasn’t until he met a cartoonist for The New Yorker at a comedy show that he considered submitting his work to the magazine.
Noth spent two weeks working on his first batch of 10 cartoons, hoping they would land him a meeting with Bob Mankoff, who at the time was The New Yorker’s cartoon editor. Not only did Noth get in the room, but Mankoff bought the only political cartoon Noth included in the bunch.
Its caption reads, “How do you respond to critics who say you’re just trying to scare people?” written as a question by a reporter. The drawing shows a White House press secretary holding a flashlight under his face like a child telling a ghost story. But it’s the context that matters. The cartoon captured the tensions around the Iraq war and the assertions of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. It also set the stage for much of Noth’s future work.
“I just sort of became a political cartoonist out of nowhere,” he says.
Noth continued to submit 10 cartoons most weeks, typically selling one or, if it was a good week, two. After 20 years, Noth has a formidable cache of rejected cartoons that decorate his house.
Over time, Noth’s style evolved from his early attempts at old-timey, etching-like illustrations to the minimalist clarity that now defines his work.
“The New Yorker was my art school,” says Noth, whose work also regularly appears in Air Mail Weekly and Alta. “I was doing 10 original drawings a week, and you learn a lot from that. Eventually, I stopped trying to have a style and focused on being as clear as possible.”
But a spin through Noth’s canon reveals a second, signature dynamic, too. “I’m kind of nice,” laughs Noth. “I have the Midwestern nice thing. And even when my cartoons have an edge to them, there’s something kind of nice about them.”
Eye for the absurd
Few cartoons better illustrate Noth’s sharp but gentle eye for the absurd than his iconic 2016 drawing that shows a flock of sheep staring at a billboard depicting a menacing wolf with the slogan “I’m going to eat you.” One sheep says to another, “He tells it like it is.”
The biting commentary, drawn in the run-up to the general presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, became a defining image of the era, capturing the appeal of populist rhetoric.
The panel, like many of Noth’s works, was rejected many times by The New Yorker before the magazine finally ran it. Why was it eventually accepted? For Noth, that remains as mysterious as the origin of a good joke.
“Jokes are a social thing, and you don’t know if it works,” he says. “That’s why I feel like I have to give myself permission to be strange and unusual. I want to make myself laugh, and I just hope that it resonates with other people.”
That ethos, his editor says, shows up on the page.
“Paul is not trying to find the most witty turn of phrase,” Allen says. “You get the sense that he is doing this for his enjoyment, and it comes through in the cartoons.”
It’s also how Noth plans to approach a new batch of comics on the heels of the Democratic National Convention.
“I’m looking for an original angle,” he says. “I don’t want to play in the dirty snow that everyone else has played in. I want the nice, clean patch of snow that nobody’s found yet.”
That particular snowy patch, Noth says, might lie in how Trump reacts to the convention. Or maybe in how members of the now-unified Democratic Party were at each other’s throats just weeks ago. There could be a funny moment in Biden’s speech.
Or a revelation might strike unexpectedly — perhaps at 4 a.m.