When I was a kid if you asked me what my ‘dream job’ was I would have said what I am doing now (only getting paid), which is write and produce recordings of my original songs then make animated films that illustrate them. I would not have known the term music video as it hadn’t been coined yet and I may not have been able to adequately describe what I was imagining without that frame of reference so I usually would answer that question with my second best job ambition. I wanted to be a cartoonist. Not a newspaper cartoonist, they work too hard, but a magazine cartoonist whose work is published just once a month. And not just for any magazine but specifically a Playboy Magazine cartoonist.
I was a big fan of Playboy cartoons, yes, I’m serious, I really liked the cartoons. I even went to a book signing of my favorite Playboy cartoonist, Gahan Wilson, a few years ago.
Back in the Eighties I interviewed with the fledgling Playboy Channel who were looking to produce some animated cartoons as buffers on their network. They were losing to the newfangled Internet and other cable porn outlets because as Playboy they had certain standards and were limited in what they could show. But with animation anything goes and they wanted some real nasty, hardcore stuff. However, they didn’t pay enough to allow me to rent studio space for their production and working on the sort of films they wanted at home when I had three little boys running around wasn’t feasible.
The reason I bring up that episode was because while I was in the Playboy Channel’s waiting room before my meeting I looked through some of the new issues of the magazine which I hadn’t read in years (refer to the aforementioned three little boys) hoping to see some of the new cartoons by my old favorite artists. What I found, to my horror, was that most of the cartoons were reprints from issues old enough for me to have recognized. Some of the cartoons in the new issues were from cartoonists who had died in the Seventies. It seemed that Playboy Magazine no longer published enough new cartoons to qualify as a legitimate income source. My dream had died.
A few years earlier my late brother had told me that a friend of his mother was the receptionist at PlayGIRL Magazine and she could set up a meeting for me with that magazine’s cartoon editor. Her daughter had gone to school with me and had been a Playboy Playmate of the Month (February, as I recall). I was not at all acquainted with Playgirl Magazine but it was published by Playboy Enterprises and was perhaps a stepping stone to my dream job at Playboy. I figured there couldn’t be that much difference between a dirty joke for a man and a dirty joke for a woman, or rather a gay man which was really Playgirl’s audience so I put my old cartoons in a manila envelope and went down to Playgirl Magazine.
I sat in the waiting room of Playgirl Magazine holding my envelop of cartoons when several other young men about my age came in to wait. They also carried manila envelopes with them. As I sat there worried that this cartoon editor had called a ‘cattle call’ for cartoonists and that I was going to have to compete with all these other guys I noticed them looking at me very strangely. They seemed to be smirking, as if they already knew their cartoons were better than mine and that I was just wasting my time. Then an assistant to the photo editor came into the waiting room and called in one of the young men. As he entered into the office the editor asked him if he brought his shots to which he responded by lifting up his envelope. I suddenly realized why all these guys were laughing at me. Their envelopes contained photographs of them in the nude as promo shots hoping to get in the magazine as a male centerfold. With my longhair, full beard and un-worked out physique I certainly was laughable as a male model and I was horrified that anyone would think that I was sitting here with nude photos of myself thinking I had a chance at being a male model for Playgirl Magazine. I instantly tore open my envelope and threw the cartoons on the floor, laying them out as if I had just decided to review them again and put them in an order for the cartoon editor. Then I loudly asked the receptionist, my brother’s friend’s mother, if the cartoon editor knew I was waiting.
I finally did get my meeting with the cartoon editor who found my cartoons offensive to women. Apparently women have a much different dirty sense of humor than men in that they objectify men whereas Playboy cartoons tended to objectify women. Who knew?
