Paul Noth is a Milwaukee native who’s published over 400 cartoons in The New Yorker. He won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in Cartoon Art in 2025, and he was recently named Wisconsin’s first cartoonist laureate.
Now, he's out with his debut cartoon collection, I Am Going to Eat You... and Other Awkward Truths: A Caroonist’s Romp Through the Lunacy of Our Times, with Hachette Book Group.
To promote the book, he'll be at Boswell Books for an author event on Oct. 22.
‘I Am Going To Eat You’
I Am Going to Eat You features a mix of over 200 of Noth’s most popular cartoons, as well as more than 50 previously unpublished works — all showcasing his signature drawing style and wit.
After two decades submitting about 10 cartoons a week to The New Yorker, Noth had plenty of material to pull from for the book.
“I thought, ‘I'll probably just end up putting them on social media.’ But to see them in print, it's a big thrill,” he says. “That's like the biggest part of it for me is all those rejected cartoons that I believed in, even if nobody else did.”
Growing up without a VCR, Noth spent much of his youth pouring over cartoon books at Milwaukee Public Libraries, and he has a vast collection today. The chance to release his first book collection is a dream come true.
“I love books of cartoons. I've always wanted to put one out, but I wanted to do it right,” he says. “I wanted it to be memorable in a certain way. And so, it was just a matter of finding the right publisher, the right people to get behind it.”
Processing through cartoons
For Noth, cartoons are an outlet to narrate the “lunacy of our times” and process life’s worries. But he says he’s rarely conscious of those things when drawing and crafting captions for his cartoons. Typically, it only becomes clear in retrospect.
“I'll look back at a cartoon from a couple years ago, and I’ll feel like, ‘Oh wow, that's really where I was. That's a time I had health worries, or financial worries,’ or something like that. And there it is, popping up in my work in a way that resonates with people,” he explains.
For example, doctor’s offices are a common motif in Noth’s work, and he’s found that those scenes seem to resonate with audiences’ anxieties. But Noth says looking back on past cartoons brings his own unconscious fears to the surface too.
“If you asked me, consciously, ‘What do you think of doctors?’ I'd be like, ‘Oh, there's no more honorable profession,’ I have nothing but admiration,” he says. “But for some reason in my cartoons, they're like insane maniacs. And so I think there's something down there that's being expressed.”
Too subtle?
New Yorker cartoons are often regarded as too clever for their own good — no thanks to a certain Seinfeld episode. For Noth, that’s a double-edged sword. Over the course of his career, he’s struggled to find the right balance between cleverness and simplicity.
“You don't want it to be too hard,” Noth says. “My editor, Bob Mankoff ... he'd look at some [cartoons], and I was making them too hard. And he’d be like, ‘It's not Jeopardy, Paul.’”
But in general, drawing cartoons for The New Yorker has afforded Noth the freedom to play with his witty sense of humor and ask audiences to meet him halfway.
“I’ve written comedy at other places where I think we were being encouraged to dumb things down, or to make them more obvious, you know?” he says. “[But] I liked that these can be a little subtle and a little bit harder to get sometimes.”
It’s that subtlety that Noth aims for in his work. He hopes to poke and prod audiences with each panel, rather than hitting them over the head with the message.
“The power of a visual idea is very strong. And you don't have to spell things out, but you can get under people's defenses a little bit,” he says.
But most of all, Noth says the goal is just to make people laugh.
“There's a lot of cartoonists who are more poetic than they are funny. I aspire to be funny,” he says. “And if they're funny, I think that the other stuff – like, ‘Are they meaningful? Are they beautiful?’— I trust that the funniness will open the door for those other qualities.”
Paul Noth will be at Boswell Books on Oct. 22, and you can listen to his conversation with Lake Effect’s Audrey Nowakowski above.
