Community Notebook >Artist Profile

Breakfast at Shanahan’s
By Nina Shengold . Photos by Megan McQuade

I am slated to meet New Yorker cartoonist and illustrator Danny Shanahan at his favorite Rhinebeck coffee spot, Bread Alone. “How will I know you?” I ask on the phone. He hesitates, then says, “I’ll be the one drawing.” His timing is perfect, so dry I can’t tell if he’s kidding. So when I arrive the next morning, I scan the tables for someone hunched over a sketchpad. My eye travels right past the iron-haired guy in the leather jacket and work shirt who’s reading the New York Post sports page; he looks like an Irish bartender. Then he turns a page and I notice his hands: slender and graceful, the left wrist encircled with Navajo silver and turquoise.

“Danny Shanahan?” The bartender looks up and smiles. He has clear blue eyes fringed with dark lashes, a pugnacious jaw that cracks into an affable grin. It’s the face of a man strangers talk to, and in fact when the artist first moved to New York, he tended bar at legendary Greenwich Village club The Bitter End.

“I started out as a porter, getting up at 5AM to mop, sweep, pick up everything that had happened the night before. Lot of bodily fluids.” On the plus side, young Shanahan got to hang out with Keith Richards and Etta James, and even served drinks to a sloshed Thomas Pynchon. But he admits to one lapse in his bartending skills: “I couldn’t remember jokes.”

It’s an endearing confession from someone who makes people laugh for a living. If you’ve opened a New Yorker anytime in the last 15 years, chances are you’ve seen a Danny Shanahan cartoon, and chances are you’ve laughed out loud. The New Yorker’s online cartoon archive includes over 650 of his cartoons and covers.

“Shanahan. Is he the one who does dogs?” asks one of my friends. Yes. And psychiatrists. Businessmen. Elvis. Raccoons. Unlike many New Yorker cartoonists who work with a limited palette of characters—William Hamilton’s tony East Siders, Roz Chast’s scrawny neurotics—Shanahan is a polyglot. His work is anthologized in the New Yorker collections of Cat Cartoons, Lawyer Cartoons, Kids Cartoons, and Money Cartoons, as well as a half dozen titles on dogs; he also illustrated the recently published More Weird and Wonderful Words, a second excursion into the forgotten corners of the dictionary with editor Erin McKean.

Shanahan’s signature, printed in a neat schoolboy’s hand, with the final “N” oddly distended, matches his humor: it’s easy to read and just slightly off-normal. “You have to develop a personal style. When I first started sending cartoons to the New Yorker, I kept trying for some kind of highbrow, cocktail-party thing. As soon as I broke the mold, they started buying my work.”

Shanahan goes at cartooning with rigorous discipline. He disappears into his studio as early as his two school-age sons will let him, usually about seven or seven-thirty, and works until two or three. “I usually get nothing the first hour. Maybe a few ideas the second. The third hour is when I start making the connections.”

He describes his work process: “It’s mostly writing. I work with a big pad, and sometimes I’ll sketch a few lines, but usually I don’t start to draw till I’ve written down about 15 or 20 ideas. Then I’ll go back and start drawing the best ones.” He starts work in pencil, then moves to a Uniball Rolling Writer pen for the 8.5” x 11” roughs he submits every Tuesday. When a cartoon is sold, he enlarges the rough to 11” x 14” and reworks the drawing in India ink and watercolor wash, trying to maintain a balance between spontaneity and smoothness. “I try to stay loose with the characters and animals. And I’m not very good at keeping my pens clean, so that affects the line.”

Simplicity is key. “Simplify your wording, simplify your line. The drawing has to nail it. You want the reader to turn the page and laugh.”

Many cartoonists work over the same classic themes—Pearly Gates, desert island, the analyst’s couch. There’s a sort of one-upsmanship in squeezing new gags from these stock situations, and Shanahan finds them a good jumping-off place for getting the flow going. His default setting is animals. “If I’m blocked, I start out with a dog or a cat.”

Shanahan grew up in eastern Connecticut, one of 11 children and countless pets (the household included snakes, lizards, an alligator, and a possibly rabid bat Danny had rescued from drowning). “I was always the observational one in the family, the quiet one taking everything in.” His father worked for Perkin-Elmer, the company that manufactured the space telescope; after high school, Danny worked briefly in its machine shop. “I was a child of the sixties—I figured if I had to do something I didn’t like, I wasn’t going to do it five days a week.”

Shanahan moved to New York, where his musician brother got him the Bitter End gig. He bartended by night and painted by day, hoping to start a career as a children’s book illustrator. When an editor friend asked him to draw some cartoons for a tennis magazine, he tossed off a few “fairly awful” cartoons, and sold them at once. After he’d published a dozen, he joined the Cartoonist Association and went to its annual party, where he found himself in a room full of New Yorker cartoonists, “surrounded by my idols. It was the first time I realized this was a real profession.”

But Shanahan still had a rebel streak: When one of his newfound colleagues told him a move to New Mexico would kill his career, he shrugged and packed his bags for Albuquerque. As he and his wife, Janet Stetson (descended from cowboy hat royalty), settled into the cabin they’d rented from a rodeo rider, Shanahan wondered where he’d tend bar for a living. But he set up a studio in a corner of his landlord’s tack barn and dutifully sent off a packet of cartoons. He was heading out for a job interview when he heard the New Yorker was buying a two-panel strip titled “Lassie, Get Help.”

The Shanahans lived in New Mexico for seven years before relocating to Rhinebeck with sons Render Elvis and Finnegan, and Danny became a regular, if unorthodox, contributor to the New Yorker, sending in
10 to 12 cartoons a week. He seems oddly impervious to rejection. “It’s hit or miss. Sometimes you don’t sell anything for months, sometimes they buy eight from the same batch. One way or another, the New Yorker turns down at least 90 percent of my work. But I love filling that manila envelope with cartoons and mailing it out every week. It’s like playing the lottery.”

What makes Danny Shanahan laugh? He likes “good funny writing, unexpectedly funny, where the weirdness seems effortless, off the cuff.” Along with cartoonists Charles Addams and James Thurber, he cites as favorites “The Daily Show,” Steven Wright, Seinfeld, and Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries—“dry humor, but dry in an over-the-top kind of way.”

Last fall, Bard College hosted a Shanahan retrospective. Along with the printed cartoons, there were dozens of unpublished works, with wry commentaries on why each was rejected. He plans to collect these rogue images in a book called either “Insult to Injury” or “The Worst of Danny Shanahan.”

Recently he’s presented some slide shows of his work, and was gratified by people’s laughter. “Cartoonists are never in the room with their audience. We don’t do standup. It’s a profession that tends to attract people who are private and shy, who would gravitate to a job where you work alone without talking all day.”

Like bartending?

Shanahan runs a hand through his hair, a characteristic gesture that leaves it in bristling neo-punk clumps. There seem to be two Danny Shanahans. One is the family man who approaches the business of making cartoons as a quiet, methodical 9-to-5 job, like a craftsman building a table. The other, the garrulous one with the wild-party streak, puts the twist in the punch line, the off-kilter bulge in that signature “N”.

The New Yorker just released its yearly Cartoon Issue, including a two-page spread set in and around a bar called Shanahan’s. It’s a grand place to drink, and the fellow who’s pouring the beers has a way with a joke.