The Rejection Collection Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap /

A Cartoon from Matthew Diffee
Here's a cartoon that's very different from the rest of mine. This one, unlike the others, has never been rejected by The New Yorker magazine. I did it especially for Amazon. Would it have been rejected if I had submitted it? I think I can safely say yes. That's not to say it isn't any good. It's just the mathematics involved. Like all the regular cartoonists in The New Yorker, 90 percent of my work gets rejected. Yep, it's sad, isn't it? We all do ten or more cartoons a week, pitch them to the magazine, and on a good week they'll take one of them. The rest disappear forever--at least they used to. Now we save our rejects up and put the best of them in The Rejection Collection. This is volume two, and just like the first one, it's full of cartoons that make the cartoonists laugh and the editors cringe.

That's because, in most cases, these are wildly inappropriate for the pages of a sophisticated literary magazine. I think you'll see what I mean when you take a look. And if you ask me, just knowing that these gags were ever submitted to The New Yorker at all makes them a little bit funnier--maybe 6 percent.

--Matthew Diffee