Help Us Laugh

When Liza Donnelly ‘77 was a young girl, she found socializing difficult. “I was painfully shy, growing up,” she said. “Drawing helped me cope.”

She remembers getting started in cartooning with one mission in mind: to make her mother laugh. Her mother was a housewife in a generation that didn’t offer women easy choices, and the girl intuited her mother’s unhappiness. “I was home sick from school one day,” Donnelly says in her upcoming documentary Women Laughing. “I was 7 years old. My mother gave me some paper, and I started drawing these cartoons. When I drew these funny pictures of people, it made her laugh. I was hooked.”

Not only was she hooked, but she went on to become one of the first women cartoonists in a magazine beloved for cartoons: The New Yorker. 

Earlham College’s Ronald Gallery in Lilly Library exhibited Donnelly’s work, including a teaser of the documentary, during Homecoming and Reunion Weekend on October 19, 2024. Organized by Christian Adams, art curator for the gallery, the event offered attendees a view of Donnelly’s work in The New Yorker, where her career has spanned 40 years. 

For Adams, the exhibition was a labor of love and a dream.

“It was a pleasure to have Liza Donnelly come to Earlham and give a show and talk on her life and work,” said Adams. “It was a wonderful afternoon, and our students and alumni had the opportunity to be present and hear her talk. I truly believe she, along with many other Earlham graduates, can help us better understand the times in which we live and are making the world a better place.”

For Donnelly, the event was almost like coming full circle, to where it all began in the 1960s.

“This is the period when I grew up in Washington, D.C.,” said Donnelly. “Political assassinations, the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, Vietnam War, abortion, women’s rights, political scandal. Those are the things that really made me who I am, in part. They shaped my work as well. I’m also shaped by my Quaker upbringing, which said to me, ‘Do something.’” 

Reporting through drawing

Donnelly’s cartooning career has taken her from graduating from Earlham to the glitz and glamor at the Oscars and, more recently, to reporting on presidential debates. Her Substack Seeing Things includes slice-of-life cartoons, political fare and frequent live drawings, which she began during former President Barack Obama’s administration.

“Every year I watch the State of the Union, and that year I was watching – I think it was Obama’s first one – I was a big fan of Twitter [now X], and I’d just gotten an iPad. I started drawing what I saw and sharing it immediately on social media,” she said.

She uses the digital notebook Paper for her drawings, and with that program, she can easily send out creations to social media.

“I sent quick drawings out on Twitter with these much stronger, bolder line drawings than some of the stuff that I do, but still my style, with commentary in the tweet,” she said. “Twitter was young at the time, and people weren’t really drawing on there. It just caught on, and I realized it was something that I enjoyed doing for national or international events. It was a way to comment, converse, report what was going on.”

If the number of followers or views she has on her social media or readers of her Substack are anything to go by — 64,000+ followers on Substack alone, with 22,000 on Instagram and 6,200+ on Facebook — the live drawings seem popular and bring people together.

“It became something I’m incredibly passionate about. It’s something no one else was doing with digital tools,” she said. “This quick communication with people, something I think I was the first to do with social media and the iPad, it was a new kind of reporting, and it’s a way to grab people’s attention in a way that words don’t, and it provides a somewhat quieter and unique view of political, national or international events.”

Emma Allen, cartoon editor of The New Yorker, agreed.

“She’s such a pioneer of that form,” said Allen. “And it’s something that’s beyond the internet, especially as we’re now trying to engage people on social media platforms. It’s become an exciting new way to think about an old thing.”

It’s no secret that the internet is ablaze with memes and humor. Allen views cartoons almost like proto-memes, slices of humor and history that may be artifacts of a dying publishing form, but that can be revived and given new life online in new, exciting ways. “When it comes to single panel or gag cartooning, we’re one of these last bastions in terms of who’s publishing this type of thing,” she said, referencing The New Yorker. “Cartoons can have such viral life on the internet and Instagram. Even older ones that end up resurfacing, people go wild for those.”

One such example is a cartoon Donnelly drew of a busy city street. Passersby walk by a man at a hotdog stand selling hot dogs for $2, soda for $1.50, and world peace, which he lists as “priceless.” He sits at his stand waiting for a customer, any customer.

“In some ways, that’s me,” said Donnelly, referencing the man working the stand trying to peddle peace, a topic she has repeatedly referenced in her career.

Activism awareness

Key moments in Donnelly’s four-decade career at The New Yorker have included 9/11 and the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005. Prior to 9/11, Donnelly had done political cartoons for the magazine as early as the 1980s. But 9/11 shook things up for her. “It made me start wondering what I was doing with my life and if I could be doing more,” she said. 

When cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad were published by a Danish newspaper in 2005, they were met with outrage and led to riots, protests and violence around the world. The controversy sparked debate about the scope of free speech and ignited Islamophobic rhetoric. While 9/11 shook up Donnelly’s world and incentivized her to make more of an impact politically with her career, the Danish cartoon controversy created a “big shift in thinking about how powerful cartoons can be,” said Donnelly. “And that coincided with the rise of the internet. It showed the power of humor and how it’s a tricky subject.”

Tricky, definitely, but not a subject she shies away from by any means. “For me cartoons are about communication, about dialogue between people,” she said. And when that dialogue inevitably leads to challenges and necessary change, she’s not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Donnelly has also been attuned to women’s rights throughout her career. “I’ve always known that I’m in the minority in my business,” she said. “When I started at The New Yorker in 1979, I was one of four women drawing cartoons out of maybe 50 men. Although a feminist, it didn’t occur to me to do cartoons about women’s rights at the time, but being a cartoonist and a woman, it was gratifying that I was among a few women who broke that small glass ceiling.”

She talks about an experience she had on a panel of women cartoonists for the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists. There weren’t many women who were political cartoonists at the time. “While I knew we were in the minority,” she said, “I began to seriously explore the question, ‘Why aren’t there more of us doing this?’ And when I got to the panel, it was just a sea of men, all male political cartoonists. It was a visual hit in the head: This is not right.”

Thus began her interest in researching the history of women in cartooning, particularly at The New Yorker. “I found a woman in the first issue of The New Yorker,” said Donnelly. “Ethel Plumber was her name. She was our first woman cartoonist.”

This research project eventually became Donnelly’s first book Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons (2005), which explores how women have contributed to the field of cartooning and also how they largely disappeared from The New Yorker in the middle of the last century, “mostly for cultural reasons,” explained Donnelly. She followed up with a second volume Very Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Women Cartoonists (2022) that continues the celebration of contributions made by women in cartooning. 

Affecting change

Allen was a big part of that push for more diversity at the magazine.

“I first came into the offices of The New Yorker for an informational interview with the editor Susan Morrison, and left and called my mother and said I could die now because I’ve been inside the office of The New Yorker,” Allen said. “A few months later I got a text from one of their assistants asking if I’d move to China. I was like, ‘no, but I absolutely can, if that’s what’s required to work for you.’” 

It was, in fact, not required, but quickly thereafter, in 2012, she became Morrison’s assistant, and from there began recruiting talent. Five years later, at the age of 29, she was promoted to the role of cartoon editor—the first woman to hold that position in the magazine’s history.

“Oh, I was absolutely blackout terrified the first few years of doing it,” said Allen. “But it dovetails with Liza in that at the time there were just shockingly few women cartoonists working for the magazine. Liza’s voice is one that is wonderful, unique and powerful. She’s always been so passionate about advocating for women and identifying injustice and making room for different voices around her even as she also has to try to promote her own work. She’s always been just a generous teacher, historian, advocate and friend. She truly is one of the most passionate people, she really cares about her work. A lot of people assume that with cartoonists we’re all cracking jokes, but no, with her and others the care and love for the work we do goes bone deep.”

A Sweet Collaboration

That love for her work also extends back to Indiana and her roots at Earlham in a delicious way: chocolates.

Clandestine Chocolates, based in New Hampshire, offers, among its usual rotation of sweets, seasonal, single edition chocolate collections, which are a collaboration with Donnelly and partners Jonathan Doherty ‘80 and Dorothy “Dottie” Doherty ’79. Donnelly and the Dohertys paths didn’t cross at Earlham, but, for two seasons, Donnelly has drawn special collections of cartoons for the company. 

Last year’s collection All We Need Is Love featured 12 original drawings that celebrated the uniqueness and diversity of humanity. The collection included ingredients from around the world, including Madagascar vanilla, Chilean cherry liquor, dark and milk chocolate ganache with Irish whiskey, and cherry pâte de fruit over hazelnut. 

The process to make the chocolates is straightforward enough: Jonathan, who is a chocolatier, uses Donnelly’s cartoon designs and creates stencils from them, then sprays them with coloring. He adds cocoa magic and creates unique chocolates for the holiday season.

“Liza is just such a phenomenally creative person,” said Jonathan. “She’s engaged in so many different things, from cartooning to live drawing to working on a documentary. It’s remarkable and a privilege to be able to do this one small thing with her every year.”

Women Laughing

“The future of cartooning is actually pretty exciting,” said Allen. “Liza pinpointed very early on ways in which cartoons could reach a wider audience and could feel more contemporary and essential. She just continues to revive the art form and get people excited about it.”

Following the success of her books, Donnelly turned to producing and directing her documentary film along the same lines as the books. The documentary, which is still in production, explores the creativity and voices of cartooning by funny women from The New Yorker including Roz Chast, Amy Hwang, Emily Flake, Sarah Akinterinwa and Bishakh Som. 

In addition to featuring women cartoonists working today, Women Laughing celebrates pioneers such as Barbara Shermund and artists of second wave feminism. Ultimately, it will reflect on the work of women cartoonists and debate challenges that lie ahead, offering a look at the state of women’s humor over the last century.

“For women, every day is a political day,” said Donnelly. “Cartoons can help us see the everyday and what needs to change. And help us laugh.” ■