Synopsis
Introductory letter by Shel Silverstein
Review
David Mamet, a cartoonist? Well, was not Henny Youngman a violinist? You might think the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter-director has enough to keep him busy. Evidently not. Trillium Press of San Francisco has just published a collection of Mamet's cartoons whose title, "Tested on Orphans," gives fair warning of the character of its content. Not sick humor exactly, but not well either. Example: warning sign at the entrance to movie theater. It reads "Shoah [no one will be seated during the last four million Jews]." Another: "If Kant had been a Valley Girl #5: Critique of Pure Reason." Beneath this heading, Mamet's sketch of a diary page with the inscription "Pure Reason Sucks," triple underscore that last word. In his other recent book, "Bambi vs. Godzilla," Mamet notes that a proper joke, as soon as its punch line sounds, seems both obvious and inevitable. He gives a two-line dialogue as an example: Q: Do you wake up grumpy? A: No, he gets up on his own. In "Tested on Orphans" he aims repeatedly at that sort of goofy irresistibility. Once in a while he hits it: Man waking to alarm asks wife looking out bedroom window, "How is it out?" She replies, "It's huge." In conversation Mamet will freely admit that he cannot draw, but he has not let that stop him. His "cartoons" are really more like ditties of comic conceptual art than illustrations anyway. As silly as they get sometimes, they often have familiar satirical targets, little annoyances for which we all wish we had rejoinders. Example: from "Small Business Strategies": under "Create a sense of urgency" two dry cleaners. One sign says "Fine Drycleaning since 1951," the other "Fine Drycleaning until 2006." The sense that Mamet sees and gets irritated by the same world that irritates us gives the contents of "Tested on Orphans" -- at least at points -- the mingling of obviousness and inevitability the author seeks. --Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle
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