A restaurant waiter in a bow tie takes dinner orders from two seated American Express cards.
A holiday reindeer with two toddler-beasties winds up a jeweled music-box at Hermès (Paris).
“Out of the unkempt hair styles and ragamuffin dress of the sixties, Mr. Koren has distilled a marvelously ironic comedy of manners,” the Times art critic Hilton Kramer wrote in 1975 about an album of New Yorker cartoons. “His hairy creatures, with their smirky animal faces and sloppy social vanities, add something genuinely new to The New Yorker’s chronicle of wayward sociability.”
As the passing years brought new technology, income disparity and the ravages of aging to America’s bourgeoisie, Mr. Koren jabbed at myriad targets:
A dowser with a Y-shaped divining rod hovers over a desktop computer.
A bearded snob on his grand portico greets a grimy plumber: “Ah, Hopkins! Finalmente!”
A bathroom mirror speaks a dreaded morning message: “Time has not been kind to you.”
“I’m the kind of American middle-class folk I like to draw,” Mr. Koren told the Knight-Ridder news service in 1982. He found subjects everywhere. Walking in the woods in California, he was passed by a jogger, who called out: “Working on my quads!”
“There’s a cartoon,” Mr. Koren said.
Mr. Koren usually tried to express something positive in a bad situation. For a New Yorker cover after terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, he drew “The Best Offense,” a mouselike creature holding up a long nib pen in its right paw and a short sword, point down, in its left.
Even his exceptions were gentle:
A television talk-show host, looking offstage at a skeleton with a scythe, says, “I see that our time is just about up.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
