Sam Gross Was Funny to the End

I learned in my twenties that it’s the octo- and nonagenarians who have the best gossip. When I started at The New Yorker, as an assistant, the late writer Lillian Ross would call with scintillating tidbits long before they broke on Twitter. After I became the cartoon editor, in 2017, Sam Gross, who died on Saturday at age eighty-nine, was the man to see for news. Pre-pandemic, when a gaggle of cartoonists would congregate at The New Yorker’s offices on Tuesdays—in part to present me with their weekly offerings, but in larger part, I suspect, to chat with one another, air their grievances, and then go get lunch—Sam was the godfather of both gripe (favorite adjectives included “screwy” and “lousy”) and gab, filling me in on the latest, and teaching new contributors the ropes.

Sam was prolific—meticulously dating and numbering the tens of thousands of cartoons stored in his studio, and publishing books with such varied and tantalizing titles as “I Am Blind and My Dog Is Dead,” “We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons,” and “Love Me. Love My Teddy Bear.” Surprisingly, he claimed to have received the most flak for the Teddy-bear collection. “Teddy-bear people don’t think Teddy bears are funny,” he’d explain, deadpan.

“I got a job!”Cartoon by Sam GrossCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoon

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Sam was born in the Bronx, to immigrant parents—his father, Mordecai Putkovic, somehow became Max Gross at Ellis Island—and he studied business at City College, which may have inspired his lifelong penchant for recordkeeping. After two years serving in Germany, an experience that yielded his first book, “Cartoons for the GI,” he married Isabelle Jaffe and traipsed with her from magazine to magazine across Europe, selling gags. The French, he’d point out, loved his stuff—perhaps because he was a savant at drawing ill-fated frogs. (One example: his beloved cartoon of a frog amputee forlornly rolling through a restaurant beneath a sign that reads “TRY OUR FROGS’ LEGS.”) “They hate me in Japan,” Sam would note, with a shrug. You can’t win them all.

Cartoon by Sam GrossCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoon

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Back in the U.S., he continued his career as a gagman for stag mags (Dude, Gent, Rascal, etc.) in the late fifties and the sixties. As one might imagine, these publications (and later National Lampoon, where he served a stint as cartoon editor) didn’t shy away from shock value; the late cartoonist John Callahan once dubbed Sam the “granddaddy of the sick cartoon.” But Sam was equally the master of the utterly charming cartoon. Just consider his drawing of a smitten snail (“I don’t care if she is a tape dispenser. I love her”), or the one of a bull and a calf gazing up at a cow jumping over the moon, with the caption: “Son, your mother is a remarkable woman.”

“Son, your mother is a remarkable woman.”Cartoon by Sam GrossCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoon

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Despite the simplicity of his line, Sam’s cartoons were never dashed off. His style was a tightrope walk of economy—precariously achieving maximum hilarity in the fewest moves, and with the humblest materials. (Sam favored No. 1 and No. 2.5 Rapidograph pens and “a pad of cheap-shit paper,” as he put it, for his roughs; finished cartoons were upgraded to a two-ply vellum.) He was quick to remind people that he didn’t draw for anyone other than himself, and yet he was always delighted when people took delight in something he’d made.

“We just haven’t been flapping them hard enough.”Cartoon by Sam GrossCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoon

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A 2007 Times article about the infamous Tuesday-cartoonist lunches, at the now defunct midtown restaurant Pergola des Artistes, describes conversation devolving “from the celestial into the obscene.” When one attendee, laughing, suggests that they drop an off-color bit, Sam objects: “As a cartoonist, you go to the end, for God’s sake! No matter what!” And he did. Just last week, a cartoon he’d submitted made me laugh so hard in my weekly meeting with David Remnick that we had to pause proceedings while I collected myself. To the end, Sam Gross was obscenely funny. Teddy-bear people are screwy. ♦