Matthew Diffee

Each week about fifty New Yorker cartoonists submit ten ideas, yielding five hundred cartoons for no more than twenty spots in the magazine. Arguably the most brilliant single-panel-gag cartoonists in the world create a bunch of cartoons every week that never see the light of day.  These rejects were piling up in the dusty corners of studios all over the country, so editor Matthew Diffee tapped his fellow cartoonists to rescue these hilarious lost gems. From the artists' stacks of all-time favorite rejects, Diffee handpicked the standouts and created The Rejection Collection, a place where good ideas go when they die. Too risqué, silly, or weird for The New Yorker, the cartoons in this book offer something no other collection has: They have never been seen in print until now.  The Rejection Collection will appeal to fans of The New Yorker...and to anyone with a slightly sick sense of humor.

From award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee—editor of The Rejection Collection and the “de facto leader of a young generation of cartoonists”(The Wall Street Journal)—a hilarious mix of cartoons, visual riffs, and illustrated one liners that will appeal to anyone who is beautiful and intelligent.  For almost fifteen years, Matthew Diffee’s uniquely funny single-panel cartoons have gussied up the pages of The New Yorker, winning him countless fans, big shot friends, and a pile of hilarious material he’s never used. This collection contains Diffee’s funniest drawings and writings from the past decade as well as all-new cartoons and sketches.  Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People will leave you laughing your smart attractive ass off.

It’s the best of the worst: 293 of the funniest cartoons rejected by The New Yorker but luckily for us, now in paperback and available to enjoy.  The Rejection Collection brings together some of The New Yorker’s rightest talents and reveals their other side -- their dark side, their juvenile side, their sick side, their naughty side, their outrageous side - and what a treat. Ventriloquist dummy cartoons, operating room cartoons, bring your daughter to work day cartoons (the stripper, the prison guard on death row). Lots of couples in bed, quite a few coffins, wise-cracking animals—an obsessive’s plumbing of the weird, the scary, the off-the-wall, and done so without restraint. Every week The New Yorker receives 500 cartoon submissions, and rejects a great majority—mostly, of course, for not being funny enough. There’s no question why these were rejected, and it’s not for lack of laughs.

Each week The New Yorker receives the protection of more than five hundred submissions from its regular cartoonists. who are all vying for one of the twenty coveted spots in the magazine.  So what happens to the 75 percent of cartoons that don't make the cut, some go back in a drawer, others go up on the refrigerator or into the filing cabinet ... but the very best of all the rejects can be found right here in these pages.  The Rejection Collection Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap is the ultimate scrap heap of creative misfires - from the low-low and the dirty to the politically incorrect and the weird. These hilarious cartoons are handpicked by editor Matthew Diffee.  They represent the best of the worst ... in the best possible sense of the word.