New Yorker Cartoonist Shares Wit and Bite

     Celebrated New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast came to Bedford Middle School on Monday to give a lecture but she didn't have to say a word to induce laughter that filled the auditorium for an hour.

     She simply displayed slides of cartoons which have graced the pages of The New Yorker and other publications for more than 30 years and let them work their magic.

     She's been described as a "creative genius" by New Yorker editor David Remnick, who wrote in an introduction to her 2006 book Theories of Everything that her drawings are "as personal and direct as any author's diaries."

     Chast's unmistakable gift is to capture a wicked or simply insightful thought and reveal it through commonplace people, oftentimes through the character of herself. She catches you unaware.

     Her work is instantly recognizable. The pictures are peopled by rumpled characters drawn in a simple, childlike style; the captions are distilled and very direct. Chast went to the Rhode Island School of Design but found drawing cartoons, a high school hobby, was her passion.

"I was very bad at most everything else," she said.

     Some cartoons don't require a caption, including the one titled "Obituaries," which is an over-a-man's-back- shoulder look at a newspaper with headlines "Younger Than Me," "Five Years Older Than Me," and "Same Age As Me," etc.,  saying all that needed be said.  It took the audience one second to get the joke and erupt.

     Chast's spoken humor is as fluid and effortless as her creativity is prolific. The on-her-feet wit is spitfire and the remarks always have a bite, just like her cartoons.

     Asked by a member of the audience if she was a cut-up in high school, she shot back "No! Quiet and hostile."

     A Brooklyn native, Chast moved to the Connecticut suburbs for her children, but don't think she has adapted to suburban life and customs.

     "I don't like to go outside," she said, in a way that made the remark hilarious.

     "I don't like natural light," she said a moment later, provoking hoots from the audience. "It moves and it's distracting."

     And she dreads driving anywhere, including Westport's "Long Lost Road."

     Chast was once asked to provide a picture of herself to illustrate a brochure. She drew a picture of herself at age 9 except that you can't see her through the hefty books on dread diseases she is engrossed in as she's lying in bed recovering from the chicken pox or the measles.

     She says overheard adult remarks about terrible medical conditions fed childhood health phobias, a sometime subject of her cartoons.

     "I find that humor and anxiety are interconnected," she said.

     Working alone, not in collaboration with someone else, is "one of life's supreme pleasures," she said. Chast is author and illustrator of a children's book coming out in August, Too Busy Marco, one of several she's published.

     Until May 30, 45 of her cartoons will be on view at the Westport Arts Center where she taught a class in cartoon-making to 40 youngsters on March 26.

     That day, she also drew an enormous mural in chalk on the main gallery's rear wall  which the Arts Center had painted black to resemble a chalk board. Hurry – The chalk masterpiece is being painted over when the exhibit ends!

     Helen Klisser During, curator of the Arts Center exhibit (called "Divine Comedy" and also featuring drawings by R. Crumb), writes of Chast's art: "We see everything from despair to hilarity – knowing that even if life is sometimes too complicated, too sad, too pointless, there is the possibility of humor along the way."

     The Monday evening event and book-signing - co-sponsored by the Westport Public Library and Westport Arts Center with a grant from Susan Malloy - were so popular that two police officers had to direct traffic.

     Roz Chast has tickled a few  funny bones indeed.