Humor in a Time of Trouble
Elwin Cartoons
I attended a small exhibition a few months ago at Carnegie Art Center in North Tonawanda, New York.
Elwin Cartoons (12/20/2019–1/19/2020) featured in the East Gallery a selection of 167 examples drawn on 5 x 7 inch paper with pen or pencil by Buffalo artist, David Corbett. The work on view evolved from casual sketches made with ballpoint pen on cocktail napkins during the last ten years, now a mounting collection of 1000+ single panel cartoon drawings. The quirky line art reflects a humorous point-of-view on the humanity of daily life.
The moniker, Elwin, is named after his grandfather, whose clever sense of humor left a strong impression. A keen follower of current events and editorial cartoons, Corbett seeks to entertain rather than present political commentary — the works tends to focus on personality, relationships, and ordinary days through characters and wordplay. The style of humor asks the viewer to take a leap to connect with the joke — smile rather than laugh out loud. The spare drawings utilize a light touch to suggest a figure with just a few broken lines, curves, and color.
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Many of the drawings on view in the exhibition were examples of Corbett’s Custom Cartoon Sundays. This social practice is a collaboration with his growing fan base of Facebook followers as they provide word prompts to inspire his cartoon creations for the day. Word offerings range from common to obscure and he always arrives at unexpected humorous depictions to demonstrate this exchange.
The New Yorker has popularized social commentary cartoons of jaded urban life and the art form is honored in the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco. The art of cartoon drawing seems to rest in the emotional response found in joining of word and picture, dating back to 1754 when Benjamin Franklin is credited with creating and publishing the first American cartoon, a woodcut of a snake broken into eight bits representing the disunited state of the colonies.
This early example presents an eerie picture that is not so out-of-date in this moment of global crisis. Corbett has naturally been influenced — his more recent cartoon art reflects this era we are living through with humor as an antidote to soothe the anxiety of the coronavirus pandemic.
Laughter helps.
Selected editions of Elwin Cartoons will one day appear in book form, as Corbett is currently assembling a series of theme-based publications. His work has been featured in Buffalo Rising and Bradford Journal.
