An Asher Perlman cartoon in the 8/12 issue of the New Yorker — deliberately contrived so as to present a puzzle in cartoon understanding:
(#1) Where are we? Who are those guys? What’s “the quiet room”? What’s “the loudest food on the planet”, and why would anyone want a bucket of it?
I ask these questions because it took me a while to get the cartoon; I was just baffled at first, distracted (as Perlman no doubt wanted me to be) by “the quiet room” and “the loudest food”, and so missed the counter with things for sale under it, and the machine with bits of stuff shooting into the air … oh, a popcorn machine! And then it all fell into place.
We are at the concession stand in a movie theater / cinema, with snacks for sale displayed under the counter. The quiet room is the theater’s auditorium, where the audience view films projected onto a screen at the front of the room. And the loudest food is that popcorn, exploding like gunfire in a machine designed expressly for this purpose, a machine like this one:
(#2) A Paragon popcorn machine for professional concessionaires (I show one of these machines because I have readers all around the world, and I’m not sure how widespread theater popcorn and the machines that make it are).
Asher Perlman. New to this blog, but he’s a multi-media comedy guy. From the About Me page on his website:
I am an Emmy-nominated, WGA award-winning, Peabody-award winning comedian, writer, actor, cartoonist, and hyphen-hunting multi-hyphenate.
I am currently a writer / performer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, a cartoonist at The New Yorker, and a performer with the Improvised Shakespeare Company. I also perform all around New York City as myself. My award-winning short film, “Accountabilibuddies,” was an official selection at the Just For Laughs Film Festival in Vancouver, and I’ve had two pilots premiere at the New York Television Festival, one of which went on to become an original series on the women-centric streaming platform, Pypo.
I developed my comedy chops in Chicago, where I performed with The Second City, the Chicago Just For Laughs Festival, iO, The Annoyance, ComedySportz, and approximately one thousand bars.
On television, I have appeared on Comedy Central, CBS, Pop TV, and several national commercials.
Before The Late Show, I was a staff writer for The Opposition with Jordan Klepper. I’ve also written humor for The New Yorker, The Onion Labs, and McSweeney’s.
Please keep scrolling and thanks for being here. The 2018 Ron Perlman movie, Asher, totally tanked my search results, so arriving at this page is a genuine achievement.
Too long to quote here in full, but I recommend AP’s “Clifford the Big Red Dog’s Latest Adventures” (illustrated by Ellis Rosen), in the New Yorker‘s Shouts & Murmurs section on 3/17/21: the fifty-foot-tall Labrador retriever wreaks puppyish havoc everywhere he goes, but then saves the world from a ninety-thousand-metric-ton intergalactic space monster, accidentally killing the thing by trying to roughhouse with it.
Then, speaking of gigantic creatures, there’s his 2024 book Well, This Is Me:
(#3) Cover of the book, with a self-caricature (both life-sized and giant-sized)
Finally, the cartoons. Most of them wry or absurdist, but a few that I find unsettling, like this New Yorker daily cartoon of 12/23/22:
(#4) What I think of as AP’s Rudolph Cartoon
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