You know that whole fantasy dinner party thing, where you choose whom you'd invite to dinner if only you could? Well, I'd put Roz Chast on my right at my party.
P.S. "I can't believe I ate all that kale for nothing" has pride of place on my refrigerator.
19
I'm almost done reading Bob Mankoff's cartoon memoir "How About Never - Is Never Good For You?", and I have to say that none of the cartoons in there made me laugh out loud as much as any of the Roz Chast ones he included. Her work tickles my funny bone to the core and makes me laugh from the belly, complete with snort, almost every time.
I loved "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant", and thought I hit the jackpot recently at an estate sale where I picked up a copy of her "Theories of Everything". Who would let such a book go? But then I discovered that it had some mild water damage at the back, and now I'll always feel like it's NOT QUITE RIGHT, and I probably SHOULD BUY A NEW ONE!
Oh, Roz, you kill me, and I can't get enough. Please come to Words Bookstore in Maplewood, NJ so I can make a fool of myself telling you how much I love you.
17
Her "Mixed Marriage" Episode 2 should have been our wedding invitation. Heck, the entire series sums up our union.
2
Roz Chast is the kinder, gentler Larry David, star of "Curb Your Dog, Please, If You Don't Mind But It's Really Okay If You Can't, I'm Wearing My Flats And It Will Wash Right Off If Only I Had A Garden Hose In The City But Wait Here's A Puddle I Can Use, My Bad, Sorry, Was That Your Dog Again"
4
NY-ier than us? How can you say that about someone who doesn't even live here anymore?
Easy. It never leaves you. I live in Florida half of the year and New York is in my bones throughout that time much to the chagrin, or maybe not, of my friends and neighbors. They've come to love the stories and the way we take measures in our lives learning and comprehending New Yorkers better through those anecdotes and the lifestyles we present. They appreciate that we are no different than they are by considering our humanity when before they viewed us as cold and indifferent.
7
I am a Flatbush-born transplant to San Francisco, living in the Bay Area now for almost 25 years. Nothing takes me back to my roots faster than Roz Chast's cartoons. For a double whammy, check out the original watercolors. Recently a terrific touring retrospective of her work was shown in SF…the scale, color, and delicacy of the drawings belie the emotional punch. These are powerful drawings to be sure. If Brooklyn had an artist laureate, Chast would be a front runner.
7
I don't think Roz Chast is "New Yorkier" than most of us. I have always looked forward to seeing her work in THE NEW YORKER so I was surprised by CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT? which seemed to expose her parents to unnecessary ridicule. In it Chast seemed to cling to her neuroticism
in an adolescent way (it felt as though she was rolling her eyes) at their expense. in general, it didn't seem funny at all - mostly unkind and uncaring- which is not like the New Yorkers I know.
m
1
Chast's "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?" saved my sanity when dealing with my 91-year-old mother's final sickness and death. That is all.
17
This librarian recommends Roz Chast's books to anyone looking for something funny. I'm so glad to hear we'll be adding a new one to the shelves.
It's impossible to pick one personal favorite cartoon, but her FAQ brochure about the Large Hadron Collider is solid gold.
https://condenaststore.com/featured/a-brochure-about-the-hadron-collider...
5
Roz Chast is good for New York, good for women and good for the Jews. With the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Anthony Weiner and Jared Kushner besmirching the entire tribe, we need her more than ever! Rock on, Roz!
29
Just so you know, we aren't judging you by a couple of your landesmen. We all have bad apples in our respective barrels. And my favorite Rozzie is the double triptych of Albert Einstein speaking to his wife.
4
Decades ago, probably some time in the late 70s, I found myself on one of those train rides from hell.
You know how it was for a while -- the train sputtered, then inched forward, then stopped, then went into full zoom along a track and into stations I'd never seen before. This was followed by another gasping sound and a halt in a dark and quiet place somewhere in the gut of the transit system.
An inexperienced New Yorker, I was more than a little unnerved. But it turned out to be one of those unforgettable New York moments that often seem to happy on subway trains.
The older couple next to me started chatting. At some point, they found out I had a job in publishing. "Have you ever heard of Roz Chast?" the woman said to me.
Of course I had heard of Roz Chast! She was young, and was at the start of her career, but her hilarious and perceptive cartoons in the New Yorker were favorites of mine.
The woman smiled proudly and said she was Chast's mother. Oh, and she and her husband just happened to have a scrapbook of Chast's work with them. We spent the rest of our unscheduled stop laughing and smiling over that book, with both Mom and Dad telling stories about Chast and her art.
I'm a veteran New Yorker now and have many different stories to tell about the city. But that one fortuitous train delay will always be one of my favorite moments. It was a consummate New York moment and I smile every time I think about it.
89
You chatted with Roz Chast's parents on a stuck NYC subway. It simply doesn't get any more "meta" than that. Priceless.
26
Interestingly, in her book, Chast claimed her parents had no interest at all in her career -- indeed, she did not speak to them for 11 YEARS.
4
I was lucky enough to attend a reading by Roz Chast in Ridgefield CT when she was on the book tour for Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? And when I got to shake her hand at the book signing, I made a fool of myself telling her how much I love her!! Of course she was utterly gracious and kind - thank heavens there is someone out there to keep us smiling in light of the horrors coming from D.C.
15
Love her cartoons! She did a series of classical music album cartoon covers for Deutshe Grammophon in the early 90s ("Over 70 minutes of digital madness"!) that did not in the least take away from the music--in fact it made listening, and collecting, more fun. Take her cover for "Mad About Vivaldi," which consists of four panels representing (you guessed it) "The Four Seasons." In each a scraggly New Yorker female (Roz herself?) stands stoically but smiling with her headphones on at a bus stop, dressed appropriately for the weather at that moment. Vivaldi would have been more than pleased.
13
Roz Chast and her book Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant supported me during the last years of my mother’s life. I have recommended it to everyone I know who is caring for a parent. The truest examination of this subject ever written. Thanks
15
Roz Chast is a gosh darned National Treasure.
I'm looking forward to her Spring Colors predictions.
If we make it to Spring.
8
It would be impossible for me to pick my favorite Chast cartoon.
Nobody - nobody even comes close to making me laugh, not only as much but in quite the same way that she does. It's almost frightening at times, as if she's the voice inside my head..... as well as the astute observer of this crazy world. Can't imagine life without her!
15
I love Roz Chast. Just ordered that book, I already have most of the others. That woman can do no wrong in my eyes. She speaks for me.
5
Roz Chast is the best! You probably won't find funnier horse cartoons anywhere!
4
Just last night, I watched the documentary entitled Very Semi-Serious: Partially Thorough Portrait / New Yorker Cartoonists. Roz Chast was one of a number of cartoonists featured. It's available on HBO Go for anyone interested. There was an amusing clip of her at a party. But I won't spoil it any more than that.
12
I love Roz Chast. Absolutely all of her.
14
I absolutely adore Roz Chast, but I utterly can't stand neurotic over-NYC'd people like her.
Is that okay?
10
No, not really.
But thanks for asking!
11
That's okay, we can't stand intolerant people like you either. Have a nice day!
9
Get a sense of humor!
1
I love The New Yorker. But if I opened it one day and all the pages were blank except for the Roz Chast cartoon, it would still be worth the price.
34
Roz Chast never mentions that her mother, Elizabeth Chast, was an assistant principal at PS 206K. I worked there for several years and loved Mrs. Chast. She was a very effective supervisor and administrator.
18
You must not have read "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?"
6
I went to 206...I never knew Mrs. Chast was Mrs. Chast!" I loved her too, she was a very kind woman.
4
Thanks for all the laughs! The gravestone with "I ate all that kale for nothing!" has got to be in my top five funniest cartoons ever! It hangs over my desk at work and reminds me that without a sense of humor all is lost!!
37
the new yorker has as much to do with new york as roz chast does
4
The latest one "The Illuminati of the NYC Subway" in the New Yorker is amazing.
13
Even her least funny cartoons are funnier than most of the other ones in a New Yorker.
She is the greatest.
41
When my mom was going down the dementia road with all of its surprises and terrors, I literally walked around for months with her book, "Couldn't we talk about Something more Pleasant?" clutched to my chest, and read it every day.
It brought solace, insight, humor. It truly helped me get through.
Love her! Filledd with gratitude!
58
In a similar situation, "Can't We..." is doing the same for me. Thanks, Ms. Chast.
2
"Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant" saved my sanity. I had been taking care of my elderly, very fixed-in-their-ways parents for seven years and couldn't express the level of frustration with EVERY aspect of the experience. People kept telling me I was doing such a good job, and all I felt was a continuous panic and inadequacy, a constant battle. Reading Roz Chast's work was like plugging into a unique plane of enlightenment. It got so when people asked me how it was going, I'd open the book to this or that page and hold it up to them. Ms. Chast got me through the eighth and final year of taking care of my parents. The book stays out in our home where it can be properly worshiped. I've got other books by her, and they all identify, and make me laugh hysterically, but that one, that's healing.
53
I really don't think I would have made it through my parents' care without that book either. I devoured it in one sitting, and at the end was crying my eyes out. It was so quiet because I was barely breathing as I read those last few pages, the drawings of her mother's face. I called my sister the next day, told her I was driving to her house (in another state!) with Chast's book because it was life-saving. Finally I heard from her a couple months later that she found the book "depressing" and "not very funny." I nearly fell off my chair! My own sister! Sometimes family is just not there for you, but thank God for Roz Chast. There's not only something hysterical and healing about that book but something holy too.
25
I had a very similar experience! I sent a copy of the book to my brother, in another state as well. He read through maybe half of it and thought it was "okay". He didn't get it. I was so flabbergasted! I finally realized that if someone doesn't actually go through this experience, even a sibling who grew up with you in the same house under the care of the same parents, they're not going to appreciate it to the same degree. And lots of reviewers on amazon wrote (even if they liked the book) that they thought Ms. Chast had shown her parents in a bad or depressing light. Again, if you're an adult child taking care of elderly parents, your perspective is going to be completely different from the child who isn't doing that job. You gain a unique understanding that it is possible to love and respect your parents AND see them as they really are--warts, maddening frustration and all--at the same time.
12
I have a now-yellowed clipping of "The Collector's Corner" on my refrigerator, which I cut out of my parents' copy of the New Yorker decades ago. Now it is surrounded by Roz Chast cartoons that my kids have cut out of our current subscription. Long may she reign as cartoon queen!
Looking at it, I see that it was included on a page of a 1986 John McPhee piece on the geologist David Love -- now collected in a book I just finished reading, "Annals of the Former World". At the time, I was only interested in the cartoons!
6
An american icon.
27
Female weirdness: YES! The world needs more of that. Thank you, Roz Chast. Keep it up.
28
Her cartoons are self-portraits! I knew what this article was about just glancing at the picture on the NYT home page, before I even read the caption.
That's either creepy or amazing.....
4
Hey Roz, Erik out here in Idaho. Keep up the good work! A NYer without one of your cartoons is a disappointment.
18
Here's on of my favorites:
https://condenaststore.com/featured/new-yorker-june-22nd-1998-roz-chast....
13
Interesting article. I get the New Yorker and cannot believe how low the quality of their cartoons has become. No more Adams', no more Larson's. The cartoons have become so lame I'm starting to read the articles more, sort of buying Playboy for the "articles"
Perhaps it's my age (70), but even "Shouts and Rumors" I only get half through before saying, "Yeah, I get it. Not funny enough to finish". Whatever happened to Perelman or Allen (his offshoot). Anyway, times change I guess. Get funny!!!
13
I remember realizing that I'd grown up when I "got" the New Yorker cartoons. Perhaps there's an end date for that as one slides into senescence, too.
9
You're right...the cartoons (with the exception of Chast and a small number of others) are not that funny any more. And I agree about "Shouts and Rumors" too.
1
Really miss the classic, class-conscious, classy cartoons by Hamilton. He Skewered the upper upper level nouveau riche would-be WASP
US aristocrats so gorgeously. And the jaws on those men!
1
What do you mean “brace yourself....Ridgefield CT”. Is that a comment on our town?
7
Well, it ain't Brooklyn get over it!
12
I also didn't understand that. Her family is famous there for having some of the most creative holiday decorations in their front yard. Really funny.
2
Loved the book and sent it to another exile in California. But, much as I miss the old NYC, I'm aware that neighborhoods that I used to be afraid to even visit I coud not now afford to rent in. I find it now almost totally gentrified and too expensive. One thing that still exists and is unique is the prevalence of those wooden water structures on the roofs in Manhattan.
Thanks for the wonderful book,
Joan Leesland, Playa Del Rey, CA
8
Rosenwach and Isseks Brothers - both companies built the vast majority of those tanks. And they're still standing like beacons of the City.
7
The pride of PS 217. Bravo classmate. Moo goo gai pan most likely at New Toy Sun!
6
There isn't one single word in this article which is not familiar to me in my very bones. I am 62, moved to single family house in the suburbs in 1992 having been raised in an apartment building in the city, felt exiled then as I do now, have two daughters privileged to be spending a few years there now and who have to bear with my constant explanations, LOVE the garment district's button shops, and can't sleep in all this quiet. The volume in her cartoons makes sense to me, and the neurosis is perfectly normal. She felt like a friend when her parents were in a nursing home after their long life in that apartment; I followed her cartoons as she was writing them, before they were compiled into Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant. I'm close to that stage now with my elderly mother. I'm happy for Roz that she is back in New York.
20
Roz Chast is as good a speaker as she is a cartoonist, maybe even better. I saw her speak once and laughed so hard for so long I actually thought I might pass out. Roz! Stop! I can’t breath!
She’s a National Treasure.
29
My office walls are covered with Roz Chast cartoons. How can I pick a favorite, when she has a direct line to my NY-honed psyche? Some early favorites: "her first ma'am,", "DKNJ" and the whole "Parallel Universes" book. More recently: "furies 3.0," "creation: the true story," "the fountain of espresso"--just to name a few. And "Can't we talk about something more pleasant" is pure genius.
7
DKNJ -- yes, yes, thank you. It was so perfect - totally and pointedly spot-on.
Roz Chast is a genius, no other word for her.
7
we love her cartoons - we always look for her work in the New Yorker as well as the work of George Booth. One of her best was about Trump: essentially word chaos going in and word chaos going out. Brilliant. Thanks, Roz.
11
"Chicken Liver With A Side of Neuroses," a night of conversation full of delightful angst, live from Brooklyn starring Larry David, Richard Lewis, Woody Allen and Roz Chast.
I'd pay a lot more than $40 to see that!
Thanks for pulling open the curtain Roz. I love you even more now!
3
And catered by the Zabars.
2
By the way, that bit about Joyce Buttons and Trims? Enjoy it while it lasts, and take photos. We used to have a shop just like that, complete with piles of multicolored tassels well and truly grimed with genuine "old dirt" (love it!) in the display window on the rue Etienne Marcel, right next to an independent furrier who showed the same slightly ratty fur-trimmed leather coats year after year. Sadly, both shops are gone now, replaced by a nut bar and a Brazilian crêperie. I guess in about twenty years someone will walk by these two establishments, if they survive, and wax nostalgic for this goofy period in time.
9
I was watching Julian Fellows on television last night and became convinced he looked like of one of Roz Chast's characters.
9
Stellar comment!
1
My dearest wish is to be reincarnated as Roz Chast. So thrilled I got to meet her and have an autographed copy of her book. Love this woman - does it say anything that I'm a psych nurse?
8
Count me in as a devoted member of the Roz Chast Fan Club. Yes, her cartoons can be weird and neurotic, but they are also deeply human. My favorite cartoon? The Young Jacques Cousteau: https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-young-jacques-cousteau-at-the-be.... Thank you, Roz, and thank you, NYT!
4
I love how she conveys her appreciation of New York, her recognition that it's a truly special place. Woody Allen used to do this equally well.
I think Mayor deBlasio's tepid popularity is due in part to a sense among the rest of us that he doesn't have that appreciation. He claims to be progressive but is instead anti elitist, which means a sour view of everything that makes NYC special. Maybe Roz should send him a copy of her book.
10
I discovered Roz Chast in high school while taking a photography class from our brilliant, calm, and lovable ABD-educated teacher. She had a book of Chast's cartoons, which we loved. "Anna Maria Malcontenta" is still part of my personal jargon on an almost daily basis, and I have fond memories of running around the photo room (we were woefully low on equipment, so we only got to print every week or so, despite being in class every day) and singing "Yo de do de do! Who's got the flan?" at the top of our lungs. My blessed photo teacher somehow emerged with her sanity intact, even so. Thanks for the decades of laughs, Roz Chast.
4
I would gladly sign over my house of 45 years, and maybe my first born to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge with Roz Chast. Her memoir about her parents sits in a place of honor until I give it to my daughter, maybe next year when I got 70? Her wonderful book "The Theories of Everything" is being read by my 13 yr old grandson. Thank Roz from the bottom of my heart.
11
My dad, who died 3 years ago just shy of his 98th birthday, was, demographically speaking, the opposite of everything that Roz Chast represents. Yet he enjoyed her cartoons immensely. When we emptied his small studio apartment of its treasures, collected from around the globe and academia, there were two well-worn books of Chast cartoons. I keep them on my bedside table and pick them up whenever I want to recall the quiet explosions of laughter they engendered in him.
40
Thank you so much for this wonderful article on one of my favorite artists of all time. I was feeling particularly anxious about a lot of things today, and it really cheered me up.
Sometimes I think I only read the New Yorker for Roz Chast. Sometimes I think she has a secret channel into my brain and all my midlife neuroses. Sometimes I think I am Roz Chast, and by a David Lynchian stroke of fate, she is my shadow double (or rather I am hers). At any rate, I cut her cartoons out, save them, and pin them to the fridge more often than with any other artist, even George Booth.
I hope Ms Chast has time to read this article and these comments and can see how many of us love her and her work.
And there is (at least) one red-headed middle-aged fan in Paris who really thinks she rocks!
32
Roz Chast never disappoints. I love her work, love reading about her. Thanks for a great piece, John Leland.
17
I thought 'Can We Talk About Something More Pleasant' was just genius. This So Californian nodded, grinned & chuckled all the way thru.
33
Love Roz Chast! Love New York! Grateful!
43
Roz Chast is one of my heroes. I'd rather read anything she has to say than listen to the news and politicians.
70
Here's my favorite Roz Chast cartoon. What's yours? https://condenaststore.com/featured/more-hamptons-roz-chast.html
18
Hilarious!
This one has been magnetted to my fridge since it was published: https://condenaststore.com/featured/new-yorker-june-30th-2008-roz-chast....
Love it!!
2
I go for Your Exact Age Obits - cut out and framed back in '93, still on display, still morbidly hilarious:
https://condenaststore.com/featured/new-yorker-october-25th-1993-roz-cha...
8
Almost every cartoon she does...but do you understand her first one referred to in the article? I'm lost...
1
Roz Chast, I love your work. You always make me laugh. It would have been very disappointing to discover your obsession with kitchen fixtures.
28
Big, BIG fan of Ms. Chast! She has been a part of my life for many years, as I dug into New Yorker magazines purloined from my father's business (I couldn't afford the subscription until years late). I feel as though we've grown up together, although many worlds apart in experience and geography. She's funny on the page and in interviews. Adore her, always will.
29
I just LOVE Roz Chast.
Her sense of humor and wry insights into everyday life never fail to make me smile. I have a New Yorker desk calendar at work, and whenever I tear the page to find a Chast toon my day gets a little brighter.
39