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thursday
Some comedians just aren’t that hilarious when they have to keep their act clean. Watch a guy like Louis C.K. or Dave Attell fumble through a set on Letterman, and it becomes painfully obvious that a few funnymen have to work blue to kill. But might some cartoonists be the same way? The minds behind The New Yorker cartoons, to judge from what shows up on the pages of the magazine, are razor-witted masters of highbrow comedy, sophisticates who would never deign to crack an off-color joke about yeast infections. Turns out it isn’t the cartoonists who are uptight—it’s the editors. Just so we wouldn’t get the wrong idea, prolific contributor Matthew Diffee has collected some cartoons that didn’t get past Eustace Tilly’s monocle in The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker, accompanied by cheeky questionnaires filled out by the 30 contributing cartoonists. The ’toons include one by Michael Shaw set in a doctor’s office, with the caption: “Now, this is going to feel like I’m sticking my finger up your ass,” and a Marisa Acocella Marchetto depicting a woman in designer jeans and stilettos bent over a toilet, titled “The Chemo Diet.” There’s also the Pat Byrnes sketch of a “Zen Litter Box” where the stones aren’t stones at all. And, lo and behold, on Page 193, a J.C. Duffy cartoon shows a gynecologist peering up a woman on an examining table. Caption: “I spy London, I spy France…neither of which rhymes with ‘yeast infection.’” Bring Diffee your stack of rejections when he discusses and signs copies of his work at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 30, at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. (202) 364-1919. (Mike DeBonis)