by Annette Hinkle
Fans of New Yorker magazine need no introduction to George Booth, who has been drawing cartoons for the publication for more than 30 years. Known for creating zany human characters who share their two dimensional world with a bevy of personality-laden cats and dogs, Booth obviously has a fondness for animals.
He also has a great love for a good play on words.
“The way I work is no system at all,” confides Booth. “I look for words that attract me, or for words or a phrase when I’m reading. I’m actually looking for an inspiration. If you do it enough, your mind works that way.”
“I have paper and pencil with me all the time and I’ll find myself sitting in a restaurant, folding the placemat or writing or drawing on it,” adds Booth who has gotten quite a bit of inspiration from menus themselves “where people get tricky with words.”
Though it’s primarily adults who know his work in the New Yorker, Booth finds he also has an affinity for connecting with children, particularly through a certain style of vaudevillian word humor, of which he is a huge fan.
“I think it’s the funniest thing that came down the road — the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy as well,” confesses Booth. “I never got away from it. I love that Marx brothers film ‘The Cocoanuts’ where Chico says something like, ‘Viaduct? Vi not a chicken?’ It’s as funny as it ever was.”
Expounding on the theme of the well-executed pun, “School! Adventures at the Harvey N. Trouble Elementary School” is a new chapter book illustrated by Booth that is geared for children in grades four through six and thoroughly populated by characters whose names kids will get a kick out of deciphering.
“I play with names all the time,” says Booth who came up with the concept, initially titled “The Not So Hotsy-Totsy School Day,” after creating a cast of characters whose names were all plays on words.
“I had established a form and I started writing it, but my agent said, ‘You’re too slow, you need help,” recalls Booth.
As it happens, Booth’s agent, Holly McGhee, also represents Sag Harbor children’s book author Kate McMullan. Knowing McMullan was a huge fan of Booth’s work, McGhee suggested the two work together on the project. McMullan, who remembers first discovering Booth’s cartoons in the New Yorker when she was in junior high school, was overjoyed by the idea.
“I always connected with his big porches and dogs,” says McMullan, who, like Booth, hails from Missouri (she’s from St. Louis, he’s from the northwestern part of the state). “His cartoons come from right out of that.”
While most children’s books begin with the written story, followed by the illustrations, the collaborative process on this book worked backwards, and McMullan began the writing process using Booth’s collection of drawings as inspiration.
“It was great, but it wasn’t really a story,” says McMullan. “I think he just wrote it to amuse himself. His parents were school teachers and he was riffing on that.”
Missing entirely from Booth’s original manuscript were any children characters, and McMullan speculates why that might be.
“This is just a wild guess, but because he does zany characters and because he is a lovely good-hearted man, he doesn’t like to caricaturize kids so much.”
But in “School! Adventures at the Harvey N. Trouble Elementary School” there are now lots of children, including protagonist Ron Faster, who, as you might expect, is quite a runner. Also among the cast of characters is the school principal, Miss Ingashoe, who can’t seem to figure out what it is she has lost, the bald music teacher Mrs. Doremi Fasollatido (who wears her orange cat on her head), a cafeteria worker named Ms. Vera Hairnet, and lots of silly students whose monikers predict what their reaction will be to any given situation that crops up in the course of the school day.
The book takes place over the course of a single week at the wacky school. Things get off to a rocky start on Monday when bus driver (Mr. Ivan Stuckinaditch) has trouble getting the students to school on time and Ron and his classmates realize their regular teacher, Mrs. Petzgalore, is absent. Instead they have a substitute, Mr. Norman Don’t-know.
“They’re exasperated with him. He doesn’t know about the Roman Empire or anything else they’re studying,” says McMullan. “Then he brings out hats and cake from his brief case and the have a party instead. At the end of each day, Ron’s father extracts a life lesson – this one is never judge a teacher by his briefcase.”
“Every day there’s a lesson — and it’s not always what you’d expect to learn in school,” adds McMullan.
“Kate’s fabulous,” says Booth of McMullan’s contribution to the final product. “You read through the book and there are no weak places. The jokes are well timed throughout. It breaks any monotony that might have had a chance to happen. Yet the monotony is part of the beauty of this book. You read it and get these silly names and you almost know what’s coming, but it’s so delightful and there’s no wandering, no excess.”
It would seem that as an author/illustrator team, Booth and McMullan make a natural pairing. Besides their mutual connection to the “Show Me State,” they share an understanding of the inner working of the minds of youngsters as well as a love of a good knock-knock joke. And for good reason — both Booth’s parents were school teachers, while McMullan used to be an elementary school teacher herself.
But in the end, it all comes down to inspiration and the ability to recognize a good gag when you see it — and for Booth, also hailing from a long line of ironically named relatives has certainly been beneficial for developing a sense of humor.
“My grandparents on my mother’s side were named Swindle and they both ran a bank,” says Booth. “The bank went bust, and they said it went bust when Uncle Crook worked there.”
And that, Booth assures, is no joke.
Both George Booth and Kate McMullan will be at Canio’s Books (290 Main Street, Sag Harbor) this Saturday, November 13, 2010 at 3:30 p.m. to read from and sign copies of “School! Adventures at the Harvey N. Trouble Elementary School.” This is the only scheduled appearance the two will be making together. For more information, call 725-4926.
