During an interview with Roz Chast at the 2006 New Yorker Festival, Steve Martin read aloud from one of her cartoons. It was a fictional help-wanted classified, touting the “opportunity of a lifetime.” Among the many absurd qualifications, applicants were expected to have an up-to-date trucker’s license and knowledge of quantum physics.

“There is so much literature involved,” Martin remarked about this cartoon, and others. “So much writing.”

Roz Chast − whose cartoons have appeared in the New Yorker since 1978 − has always been a master at finding the perfect balance between the literary and the visual. Her cartoons do not depend on funny pictures to sell the joke. But, at the same time, they never seem overcrowded and dense with needless explanation or rambling punch lines. She’s a rarity among her creative brood − a cartoonist whose humor can be appreciated without the drawings.

SACKS: How much did the New Yorker mean to you, growing up in Brooklyn in the 50s and 60s?

CHAST: Not much, truthfully. The New Yorker wasn’t something that I focused on when I was a little kid, even though my parents subscribed. I read Highlights for Children. It wasn’t until I was about eight or nine that I discovered the old New Yorker cartoonists like Charles Addams.

My parents were both involved with education. My mother was an assistant principal at a Brooklyn elementary school, and my father taught high school. Each summer, we would drive from Brooklyn to Ithaca, New York, to Cornell University, and we’d rent graduate-student housing, because it was cheap. When my parents attended lectures, they’d stick me in the browsing library in the student center. There was one section that contained only cartoon books. I would look through these books and just die.

I especially loved Charles Addams. It was the funniest stuff I had ever seen − just amazing. I still remember the books: Monster Rally, Addams and Evil, Black Maria, Drawn and Quartered …

What was it about Addams’s cartoons that appealed to a 9-year-old?

For one thing, I “got” them. I couldn’t relate to some of the other New Yorker cartoons, like the ones in which grown-ups said witty things to each other at a cocktail party. That just didn’t make any sense to me; I had no idea what a cocktail party was, really.

But with Addams, I understood the jokes. It was sick humor − very black. They were funny to me. Plus, there were kids in them! A few of his cartoons I’ve never forgotten. One had an entire family pouring boiling oil onto a group of holiday carolers. In another one, the Uncle Fester character is waving to the car behind him to pass, even though he knows an oncoming truck is approaching. Or the cartoon where Uncle Fester is grinning as he watches a movie, while everyone else sobs. So many great ones! Very transgressive.

Wolcott Gibbs, the New Yorker writer, once wrote that Addams’s work was a denial of all of the spiritual and physical evolution in the human race. Maybe I related to that.

Even when you were nine?

Oh, when I was a kid I was obsessed with all sorts of weird, creepy, dark things. I was fascinated with medical oddities and bizarre diseases. My mother’s sister was a nurse, so we always had The Merck Manual lying around. I didn’t understand much of it, but I did understand the symptoms. Just the faint possibility that I might have leprosy or lockjaw or gangrene . . . tantalizing and terrifying.

I’m still fascinated with that sort of thing. Last night I watched this incredible medical show on television and laughs . . . I shouldn’t laugh, because it’s not funny at all, but the show featured a woman who turned silver.

She turned what?

Her skin turned silver, but I can’t remember why.

I suppose it doesn’t matter, really.

It doesn’t matter, it’s true.

Oh, actually, I do know why! When she was a kid, a doctor prescribed nasal drops that had silver in it.

And you’re not confusing this person with a superhero?

No, she was definitely just a normal woman who turned silver. The condition is called argyria.

To me, that’s the ideal type of disease show. If I watch a show that features, say, a man with an extra arm growing out of his shoulder, I know that I don’t have that condition and I never will. Same with parasitic twins. Horrifying, but not contagious.

What is it about these medical conditions that fascinated you? Are you intrigued by the outsider element?

Have you ever seen Dear Dead Days? It’s a book by Charles Addams [Putnam, 1959], and it’s a compendium of all of these odd images − weird photos of patients suffering from rare diseases, criminals, revolting or frightening architecture, wheelchairs. I loved that book.

Many writers and cartoonists are fascinated by people who live on the outskirts of society − criminals, the mentally ill, those suffering from deformities.

Those people are more interesting than the everyday humdrum. To quote [photographer] Diane Arbus, “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

I suppose it’s also helpful for a creative person to look where others might not be looking.

Maybe. If I could, I would look where everyone else is looking. But my attention is always drawn elsewhere. When I was in school, trying to listen to the teacher talk about the French and Indian War, I would be distracted by irrelevant things like the ugly shoes she was wearing.

You drew a New Yorker cartoon about that.

I did. It was called “Newly Discovered Learning Disabilities” [December 3, 2001], and one of the entries was “Doodler’s Syndrome.” The child in the cartoon insisted on drawing and didn’t hear a thing the teacher was saying − very similar to my own experience.

You’d be labeled A.D.D. today.

Oh, absolutely! It’s still very hard for me to pay strict attention to something that I have to listen to. I once drew a cartoon called “Adult Attention Deficit Disorders” [The New Yorker, June 7, 2004]. It included “Financial Information Disorder,” “Driving Directions Deafness,” and “Technical Manual Fatigue Syndrome.” I suffer from all of them − and more.

I’d love to be able to pay attention to a lecture about saving money on my taxes, but I’m always fascinated by the silver person sitting in front of me.

How often does that actually happen?

Not often enough.

Were you a fearful child?

I remember I was afraid of kites, but I have no idea why. Actually, I can sort of guess: I had an uncle who told me that if I were to hold onto a kite long enough I would be lifted into the sky.

I’d say that’s a pretty good reason. Everyone seems to have an uncle like that.

Yes, they do. Kids believe anything you tell them. I did, anyway. I could easily convince myself that something bad was about to happen, or that I was about to come down with a terrible, incurable disease.

My parents were older than all of my friends’ parents. They came from a world where people actually did get diphtheria. I remember my mother describing having had diphtheria as a child; she said it was like having “a web across [her] throat.” My grandmother supposedly stuck her finger down my mother’s throat and pulled out the web. This was very real to me. I heard that diphtheria story many times.

My parents were both forty-two when they had me in 1954. They were a link to another time and place, and that affected me greatly. A lot of my friends had parents who had experienced the excitement and the prosperity of the 50s, whether they were “red-diaper babies” or “Eisenhower babies.” My parents didn’t seem to know anything of that; I might as well have been raised during the Depression. My parents grew up poor in households that spoke mostly Yiddish. They were from the Old World.

How did your parents feel when you achieved success? Did they understand your cartoons?

Sort of, but they were more excited that I had insurance laughs.

Did your parents allow you to own comic books?

My parents were very serious; they did not like pop culture at all. Comics were considered “crap.” They did buy me Classic Comics, however. Have you ever seen them? They’re illustrated versions of Moby-Dick, Robin Hood, and other works of literature.

They were like pieces of candy that looked great but tasted terrible. The sad part was that an illustrator actually drew them. So much work went into them, and they were really horrible. They were like the “Prince Valiant” comic strips in the newspaper: meticulously drawn, but, to me, a waste of good comic space.

Were your parents influenced by the Senate subcommittees on juvenile delinquency in the 1950s? And the 1954 anti-comic screed, Seduction of the Innocent, by the psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham? The book implied that comic books would lead our nation’s children to ruin.

I think it might have been more of a class issue. They thought comic books were for stupid people, and if I didn’t want to be a stupid person with a stupid job who was going to live a stupid life in a stupid apartment and marry a stupid husband and have stupid children, then I shouldn’t be reading comic books.

I did manage to borrow some issues of Mad magazine from my cousin. I loved Don Martin and the way he wrote out all those amazing noises his characters made. I loved the way his characters’ shoes would bend − you know, the top part of the shoe would sort of bend over at a 90-degree angle. He just drew funny. I’ve never forgotten one cartoon in particular, for some reason: a man in a bathroom is using a towel-dispensing machine, and a sign says: Push Down and Pull Up. This guy takes the whole machine and pushes it down and pulls it up, and rips it off the wall. The joke itself wasn’t even that great. It was just the way Don Martin drew the guy’s expression. He drew great expressions.

Were Archie comics allowed in the house?

To my parents, Archie was the devil. So, of course, that’s what I wanted to read the most. I thought Archie comics were fantastic. Even though they already seemed kind of dated when I was reading them in the 60s, Archie and Jughead and Betty and Veronica were very seductive to me.

Seduction of the innocent.

Right. It was sort of a parallel universe with all these people who didn’t look like they lived anywhere near Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn. There were no girls with beehive hairdos, or people who would punch you in the school hallways for no apparent reason.

What did Manhattan represent to you, as someone who grew up right across the East River?

Speaking of parallel universes! It was a different world for me, and it was magical. When I was young, I attended weekend art classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan, and I really liked it. As I got older − after I moved to the city − I loved it even more.

As for my career goals, I never, ever thought that I would one day be published in the New Yorker. I was hoping that maybe, fingers crossed, I might one day have a strip in The Village Voice, because that’s where Jules Feiffer and Stan Mack were published. When I first began to sell my cartoons in the late 70s, I was mostly dropping them off at The Village Voice and National Lampoon.

What was the magazine-cartoon market like in the late 70s?

There were very few outlets. The “golden age of cartooning,” as the cartoonist Sam Gross used to call it, was over by this point. It used to be that all of the male cartoonists − and they were pretty much all male − would put their work into a portfolio each week. First, they’d go to the New Yorker, because that was the top of the heap. Whatever cartoons weren’t bought would be taken to the editors of the next tier, like the Saturday Evening Post or Ladies’ Home Journal or McCall’s. They would make the rounds and work their way down the list, to the very bottom − maybe eventually even to [pornographic men’s magazine] Gent.

That process was already over when I started to pitch my cartoons to magazines in the late 70s. For one thing, there were so few magazines publishing cartoons. It was much more difficult to place them. It was pretty much down to the New Yorker and National Lampoon. There was Playboy, but that wasn’t on my list.

Did you always write your own cartoons? Or did you have outside gag writers help you?

No, I always wrote my own. Gag writers were more common in the past. The tradition of the gag writer selling cartoon ideas to an artist had begun to end in the 60s. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as gag writers until I became a cartoonist. A lot of famous cartoonists used them, like Peter Arno, George Price . . . even Charles Addams would sometimes buy gags − which really freaked me out.

When I first started, for maybe the first seven or eight years, I would receive packets from gag writers. And that was very weird. The envelopes would arrive, and I’d just go, Arrrghhhhh!

I knew that these people were going through a list of cartoonists’ names, and mine was on there somewhere. The gags were always very traditional and mostly pretty lame: “Two guys standing in a bar talking,” and then there’d be a corny punch line you’d read eighty times before. It was obvious they’d never seen a single cartoon of mine.

Who were these gag writers? Were they doing it for fun, or did they actually make a living at it?

I have no idea. I don’t think they were young people, because I can’t imagine a young person doing such a thing. I always imagined them as middle-aged men living alone in small apartments, above stores on main streets in sad, grim towns. Even the envelopes the gags came in were sad − all crumply and yellowed and hand-addressed in a saddish way.

How old were you when you sold your first cartoon to the New Yorker?

I was twenty-three. I went under contract at the end of that first year. I think a lot of it had to do with my being in the right place at the right time. Maybe the magazine wanted to attract younger readers. Lee Lorenz was the art editor at the time. I will always be grateful to him.

Did you feel that the New Yorker wanted to include underground cartoonists and their sensibility in the magazine?

No, not underground, exactly. I didn’t have that sense at that time at all. I think they just wanted to open it up a little to maybe a “younger sensibility.”

Do you feel that it helped that you were a female cartoonist? There weren’t many at the New Yorker at the time.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t only because I was female. I signed my cartoons “R.” They didn’t know what I was.

I think there was only one other female New Yorker cartoonist in the late 70s, although there’d been more in the past, like Helen Hokinson, Mary Petty, Barbara Shermund, and others. Now there are about five. I didn’t think much about the “female” thing.

How much were you paid for your first New Yorker cartoon?

$250.

How much are you paid today for a New Yorker cartoon?

$1,300.

What was the reaction to your first one? Even looking at it today, I find it to be very odd and different. It’s called “Little Things,” and it features bizarre shapes with funny names: “chent,” “spak,” “kabe,” “tiv,” etc. There’s no gag − at least in the traditional sense.

I think a lot of readers were pretty perturbed. Some of the older New Yorker cartoonists were really bothered by that cartoon, too. It’s strange that Lee chose that one. I had submitted fifty or sixty, and this was the weirdest in the batch. It was so rough and personal, and it was so weird.

Laughs Later, Lee told me that somebody had asked him whether he owed my family any money.

It was certainly a break from the type of New Yorker cartoon that came before.

I knew that my cartoons were quite different, which is why I never really thought they would appear in the New Yorker. I never deliberately set out to be different; that’s just how I draw. But if I tried to conform to somebody else’s idea of what’s funny, I’d have no compass at all. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Has the New Yorker’s submission process changed for you since you first began?

No, it hasn’t changed much at all. I’ve submitted, let’s see: thirty years times forty-six weeks on average a year . . . whatever that is, since I first started, and I still do it basically the same way: Each week I submit between five and ten cartoons. Usually, about six or seven.

And how many, on average, will be accepted each week?

It’s really hard to say. I might average one per issue for maybe three or four weeks in a row, but then I might go for three or four weeks and not sell any. And then the next week, for no reason at all, it seems, they’ll buy two.

Someone once told me about a psychological experiment that was done with rats: if you keep rewarding the rats with a pellet each time they push a lever, they will eventually become bored and stop pushing the lever. And if they receive no pellets at all, they’ll get discouraged and stop pushing the lever. But if you provide them with intermittent, random pellets, they just keep pushing that lever. Sometimes I feel like I am that rat.

It’s a tough business. You only feel as good as your last sale. Even this many years later, I still get depressed if I haven’t made a sale for a couple of weeks. I always feel like that’s the end of it, you know − I really have run out of ideas!

You would think that by now I would understand that when I get depressed, it’s part of the cycle. But it’s still hard. The fact is, there are no guarantees. I don’t know too many cartoonists who are super-confident people.

Do you hand-deliver these cartoons to the New Yorker office?

I used to go every week, but it just took too much time. In the 80s, I’d have a weekly lunch with the rest of the New Yorker cartoonists. But when we all moved out of the city, the group disbanded. I feel I can better use my time to stay at home and work. Or procrastinate.

Anyway, once a week, I fax a batch of rough sketches to the New Yorker offices. I try to draw pretty much what the finished cartoon will look like. You know, if people are standing in a room, I’ll sketch the room, but I won’t put in all of the fine detail until the cartoon is bought. The initial versions are always rough. If they buy it, I do a “finish” − a finished version of the sketch.

How long does a finish take?

For a very simple drawing, it might take an hour and a half. For a more complicated one, especially those in color, it might take several hours.

What exactly goes on in a New Yorker cartoon meeting? To me − and, I think, to many others − the New Yorker is almost like the Kremlin. It’s a world of mystery, smoke, and mirrors.

I’ve never been to a New Yorker art meeting where the editors talked about cartoons. It’d be like peeking in on your parents and accidentally seeing them doing things you know they do, but don’t want to think about them doing.

I once read an article that described the process, but I’ve since repressed it. As much as I would like to imagine the editors saying, “This one is really good, but this one is even better!,” I know the disgusting, painful reality.

Do a lot of these ideas for cartoons gestate for a long time before you sketch them?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Often, ideas will crop up when I’m in my studio just doodling and thinking. I remember when I was drawing “The Fantastic Voyage” Scientific American, July 2002]. I had been thinking about the cliché of spaceships and strange submarine-like vehicles that would travel through the body in sci-fi films from the 50s and 60s. I wondered, What if people were in a broken-down bus instead? Or in the family sedan? That’s how that cartoon came about.

I once doodled a crazy man holding a sign that read: THE END IS NEAR I just felt like drawing one of these guys − who knows why. After looking at the guy for a while, I realized that he needed a crazy wife. So I drew him a wife, and she was holding up a sign that said: YOU WISH. That one came out of the blue.

What ideas are you currently mulling over?

I’m working on an idea now. I wrote down, “Break Internet.” I like the thought of breaking the Internet, as if it were a toy or an appliance. Now that I describe it, it sounds pretty lame. [The cartoon was not bought.]

How extensive is your backlog of unsold cartoons?

Thousands and thousands. It’s an ocean of rejection. A lot of them are very dated, and a lot of them are just plain bad, but in that pile I will sometimes find something I want to rework. I have so many rejected drawings that it almost becomes raw material for me. When I’m stuck, I sometimes go into that file, and I’ll see if there’s an idea hiding that can be fixed.

How much time do you spend on the exact wording of your cartoons?

It really depends. Sometimes a cartoon will be very clear in my head from the minute I conceptualize it. Other times − especially with a multi-panel “story” cartoon − it takes longer. I like the editing process. I think − I hope − that this is something I’ve gotten better at as I’ve gotten older. I probably could have done more self-editing when I was younger.

Specifically, what sort of self-editing?

Eliminating things I don’t need; paying attention to the rhythm of a joke. I don’t want to make anyone read more than absolutely necessary.

I wonder how many readers even notice how finely structured the wording is in certain cartoons − such as with your work, or Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury,” or Gary Larson’s “The Far Side.” There’s never an extra comma or beat.

Bad rhythm is something you see frequently with amateur cartoonists. With that said, there are times when I can feel the rhythm of a cartoon more clearly than at other times. I work on deadline, and I have to do this whether I’m in the mood to work or not. But why I’m in the mood sometimes and not at other times is still a mystery.

Do you have tricks you’ve taught yourself that have made the process less difficult?

Getting away from work and coming back to it fresh really helps. Also, Truman Capote once said that if you have to leave a manuscript or a chapter, don’t finish up the last little bit, because then, when you come back, you’ll have to re-start from nothing. I’ve often used this approach. If I’m going downstairs for lunch, I leave something I’m excited to come back to − so I won’t be starting from zero miles per hour. But it doesn’t always work.

Do you consider yourself as much a writer as a cartoonist?

I don’t consider myself as much of a writer as a “real” writer − those writers who write without drawings. And I don’t consider myself as much of an artist as a “real” artist − somebody who paints without using any words. But cartooning is a hybrid, and cartoonists are hybrids. We feel incomplete doing just one or the other. When I have to write and I can’t use pictures, it’s very frustrating.

So where do you see the art of cartooning in the future? Do you think it’ll remain a viable profession?

I don’t know how viable it is now. It’s a very tough profession. I really don’t know whether cartooning for magazines will stick around. There’s a lot written about teenagers and print media and how irrelevant the non-electronic media might soon become. I really don’t know what’s going to happen. But I do know that if someone wants to become a cartoonist, they’re going to find an outlet.

I’d like to learn more about animation programs. If there were a computer program that wasn’t too difficult to learn, I might just give it a shot. Hopefully you can always learn something new− always, always, always. Key word: “hopefully.”

Any advice for cartoonists starting out with their careers?

I’m really grateful for the life-drawing classes I took at art school. Not that anyone looking at my characters would believe it, but I think life-drawing is really important. A cartoonist has to know how a body sits or stands on a page. It’s like learning a language.

I feel that on my deathbed, which is something I hope to eventually have, I’ll probably look back and wish that I didn’t always look on the dark side of everything. But how can you not? You could die at any time, for any reason. You’re walking under an air conditioner, and kaboom! My parents actually know someone who was killed by a falling flowerpot. But we have to kind of go along and put one foot in front of the other and pretend that we don’t know that everything could take a serious turn for the worse in the next second.

It’s all in the pretending.

Yes, it’s all in the pretending. Any of us could walk outside right now and Mr. Anvil could suddenly meet Mr. Top of Head. But we pretend otherwise.

Actually, that’d make for a nice cartoon.

And if I’m safely off to the side while it happens to you, and if there’s a deadline looming, I would absolutely love to draw it. Laughs

Roz Chast’s books, Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006 and The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z! (with Steve Martin) are available at your local bookseller.