Emma Allen

Do jokes express our otherwise taboo wishes? Or does everyone just need a pie in the face?

Well, it seems that many of you also enjoyed double-tapping on New Yorker cartoons this past year (for which I, as cartoon editor, join the cartoonists in thanking you). Jokes about exercising and parenting, pets and sports, socializing and personal hygiene: you liked them—a lot. So in the generous holiday spirit of not watching a kid get bucked off a pony, I instead invite you to enjoy these delicious, butyraceous cartoons, which you all dug the most on Instagram in 2023.

Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells Channel Two Pals from Junior High

Amanda Stern, whose book “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah” is now an Adam Sandler movie on Netflix, discusses spaghetti straps and goyim friends at Bloomingdale’s.

After five reported bites on Long Island and a recent chomp in the Rockaways, New York’s lifeguards have added predator-spotting drones to their tool kit.

On an art-fair rooftop, New York grade schoolers peddle refreshments to benefit art education in public schools.

An in-demand accompanist to comedians (Matteo Lane, Catherine Cohen, Matt Rogers), he now also performs solo, as his alter ego, Henki Skidu, with a magic rock around his neck.

His style was a tightrope walk of economy, achieving maximum hilarity with the fewest moves, and with the humblest materials.

The artist, who was first published in The New Yorker in 1962, never stopped marvelling at the miracle of a cartoon’s creation.

The editor, writer, publisher, and only subject of the sometimes weekly Jennifer Mills News considers stories such as “Woman Finds Hardboiled Egg in Purse.”

A collection of our most widely read humor pieces of the year.

The cartoonist—who depicted dogs, porch-sitters, mechanics, cave-dwellers, bath-takers, military men, yokels, and churchgoers—worked and lived with uncontainable self-amusement.

Benjamin Keating tours an exhibition of his sculptures, which combine bronzework with tiny trees, and recounts how he found an in with a secretive bonsai guy by bribing him with tomato sauce and fresh pasta.

Telling jokes to a New York audience is tough enough; two Brooklyn comedians have added exotic animals to the mix, with their new showcase, “Petting Zoo.”

Yvonne Pickering Carter was leaving her South Carolina home when the haulers tipped off a local gallerist to her works. Now she’s being exhibited in New York alongside Lee Krasner and Alma Thomas.

The artist Fred Tomaselli spent the pandemic painting psychedelic designs and collaging over front pages of the Times—surreally mismatching headlines and photos, like the late Barry the Central Park Owl with the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal—now on display in a digital gallery show.

Thursday’s film première and discussion dig into Booth’s many decades of boisterous comic creations.

The ninety-year-old artist, once known for photo-realist works, dishes on Josef Albers (a bit of a letch), the Abstract Expressionists (sex-crazed), and Rodin (“a perv”), as she prepares for a new show.

I solemnly swear we won’t publish anything by you without compensating you for it.

There’s been a lot of laugh-crying ’round these parts. Thanks to the ever-adaptive minds of the super-funny, it was not just permanent cry-crying.