Very Semi-Serious (USA)  

The New Yorker has published roughly 85,000 cartoons since it began in 1925, and since 1997 they’ve been edited by Bob Mankoff, himself a contributor for almost 40 years.

That’s a lot of ink, and this satisfying character study is careful to balance a quirky portrait of the shaggy man with the magazine’s rich lore, which includes the deathless work of ghoulish Charles Addams and abstract Saul Steinberg. The latter, according to Mankoff, made cartooning “an art as well as an aspirational enterprise”. The same can be said of his whole department, which gathers potential contributors, both very young and quite old, on devotional Tuesdays, when he goes over new submissions, taking the best to editor David Remnick. It’s clear that neither man can quite believe his good luck.