Matt Diffee - Musical Chairs

 

So, when I was a little kid and I first heard the term musical chairs, I thought it was going to be a lot more exciting than it turned out to be. [audience chuckles] Right? It's just a dumb game. The chairs aren't musical at all. [audience chuckles] I was similarly disappointed with a couple other terms, baggage carousel [audience chuckles] and even Nazi party. [audience chuckles] The problem with musical chairs is it's a terrible game. It's not fun, it’s just stressful. I don't know why we do this to children. I mean, the only good thing about it is it sort of prepares them for the harsh brutalities of adult life.

 

Because it's like that, at least at the beginning, you know, where everyone wants to sit down and there's just not enough chairs. [audience chuckles] Good thing about the game is it only lasts a couple seconds. In real life, it can last a lot longer. In my life, that frantic scramble lasted seven years. It started the day I graduated from college, I realized the music had stopped. [audience chuckles] See, I had two problems. First, I had a BS degree, and I mean that in both senses of the term. [audience laughter] I had a degree in art. I think we can all agree that's a BS degree, right? My minor didn't help at all, I was a creative writing minor. And for me, that was always comedy writing. So, art and comedy, those are the two things I wanted to do.

 

And that brings me to my second problem. I grew up in rural Texas and then later North Carolina. And I'm not going to say that it's harder to pursue comedy and art in the rural south, [audience chuckles] but it is harder to pursue art and comedy in the rural South. [audience chuckles] It's the same reason you don't hear about a lot of little girls in the Upper East Side of Manhattan growing up to be champion barrel racers. It's just hard to find the beginning of the path. [audience chuckles] But you don't know what you don't know. So, I took off running after it. I painted every day. I tried to petal paintings to friends and neighbors, tried to get them in galleries, I got them in restaurants. Yeah. Nothing happened.

 

I also was pursuing comedy at the same time. I had a comedy team. We did open mic nights. We did shows everywhere we could. I don't have to tell you guys how it went. Nothing ever happened. Eventually the other guys wised up and got real jobs and I was on my own trying to do standup and trying to write plays and everything I could do. But nothing was working and nothing was making me a dime. So, I obviously had the long string of crappy day jobs. Anyone? [audience chuckles] I was a waiter, obviously. What's worse than that? I was a waiter at Applebee's. [audience chuckles] Worst two weeks of my life. [audience chuckles] I was more suited for outdoor work. So, I did all kinds of construction and I did asphalt repair and sealing. And this is in 100-degree weather, 100% humidity. It was terrible.

 

The best actual crappy job I ever had, and this might surprise you, was when I was a night shift clerk in a convenience store gas station out by the interstate. You know those. I'm serious. It was actually the best job I ever had. Sure, I had to mop up and stock the coolers and had to clean the bathrooms. Yeah. But about 2:30 after that was done, I had the place to myself until 7:00 AM. Pretty much some long-haul truckers, some Waffle House waitresses, but it was basically just me and a stack of books, notebook to write in. I had endless coffee, free Slurpees, come on. [audience chuckles] I even had those greasy convenience store hot dogs, spinning in the rotisserie if I ever wanted one. Never did. [audience chuckles] 

 

I will tell you something about those hot dogs. I never touched them. I never took the old ones off [audience laughter] and I never put new ones on. As far as I know, no one ever did that. [audience laughter] I'm pretty sure those weenies came with the machine. [audience laughter] And that's basically how I spent my 20s. 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, yeah. 27, undatable. 28, oh crap. 29. I'm 29 years old. I'm still trying, still nothing's happening. I just wanted a chair to sit in. And I didn't want a lazy boy. Right? I wanted a work chair, one of those task chairs. I just wanted a chance to do the thing that I thought I could do. I know there's people out here who can relate. The 29, nothing.

 

One night, about midnight, I'm doing what I always do at that time, I'm watching Letterman. Me and Letterman got me through a lot of hard years. I watched Letterman so religiously that when for some reason I pick up the remote control and I start flipping through the channels, I realize I don't have any idea what comes on at this time of night because I always watch Letterman. It's like foreign television. I’m like-- [chuckles] And finally, I rest on Nightline because they're doing a special feature on these cartoonists from a magazine out east called The New Yorker. This is because The New Yorker is about to publish its first ever cartoon issue, whole issue about cartoons. So, I stopped and I watched this. And I was like, "Huh" I know you guys are probably familiar with The New Yorker, I was not. I told you I grew up in Texas. My family didn't subscribe to The New Yorker. We weren't communists. [audience laughter]

 

So for me, cartooning was always just the googly-eyed greeting card kind of thing. You know what I'm talking about? I didn't want it, like it's not funny, more punny than funny. But this was different. Suddenly I was looking at something and it was very similar to the streamlined one liner jokes that I admired from people like Woody Allen and Stephen Wright. And the art was different, it wasn't like generic cartoon character. Each one was different. It was art. It was comedy and art. I'm thinking. "Hmm." Now in this-- to tell you how significant I realized this was I grabbed a VHS tape and I threw it in the VCR [audience chuckle] and pushed record. Some of you guys remember those.

 

And then I watched the tape over and over the next few days and I freeze framed it and I studied like what kind of pencils they were using. And then when this special issue came out, I went out and grabbed the issue off the newsstand and just really pored over it, memorized it. And in that magazine, there was announcement for a cartoon contest that was sponsored by The New Yorker and the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Interesting. And this was before The New Yorker started doing the caption contest in the back. And this one, you had to do everything, the cartoon, the whole thing, both parts. And it had to be about hotel life. I didn't know what that was. Still don't really. [audience chuckles] But one thing I did know is that I was going to enter this contest.

 

So for a couple weeks, that's all I worked on. I went to the library, checked out a bunch of those old cartoon collection books, poured over them. And I remember one of those cartoonists stood out to me was George Booth. Some of you probably know his work, it's always that he draws that single light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and the old crazy country people and the dog. Some of you do. Anyway, I loved the drawings and I loved the jokes, but what really stood out to me was the fact that this rural sensibility felt so perfect in this sophisticated city slicker magazine. I filed that away, and a few weeks later, when the deadline came for the contest, I sent my ideas in.

 

A couple weeks later, I heard that I was one of the three finalists. [applause] Crazy, right? So, me and my high school buddy got to fly to New York City. They put us in the Algonquin Hotel. [audience chuckles] We walked in. There's the Algonquin Oak, round table, and the walls are all dark wood paneling and copper lampshades. And we didn't actually say it out loud, but I'm pretty sure our clothes and the looks on our faces were like, "golly." [audience laughter] And I'll tell you this. In the hotel, in the Algonquin, they have custom one-of-a-kind wallpaper in the hallways and the stairwells and stuff. And it is made of old classic The New Yorker cartoonist. And I was thinking, "Yikes, this is really a thing I'm getting into here."

 

So, the big day came, and I put on my good duds and I went down to the ceremony, and I met Roz Chast, and I met Sam Gross and some of the other legendary cartoonists. And I met Bob Mankoff. He's the cartoon editor at the magazine, and he was the juror of this contest. So, he was about to present the grand prize to one of the three finalists, and [excitingly] it turned out to be me. [cheers and applause] I know. And the prize was this giant Styrofoam check [audience chuckles] that I got to give to charity. [audience laughter] I was thinking the same thing. We were posing, Bob here and me here, and we're posing there taking photos. And I was really thinking, I bet my construction worker fingers could probably take his sissy literary fingers, and I could probably yank this thing and make a break for it. But then I started thinking, it's a revolving door to the street. I don't know how that would work. And even if I did get through, I don't know how do you cash a check? It won't fit in the slot. Have to lob it over the Plexiglas. Anyway, so I reluctantly let go of the check.

 

But my real prize came about an hour later. We were mingling, and when I say mingle, I mean I was standing in the corner alone, [audience chuckles] and Bob Mankoff came up and he said, "So, have you ever submitted cartoons to the magazine?" And I resisted saying, "Not only have I never submitted cartoons, the cartoons you saw were the first cartoons I've ever done in my 29 years on Earth." And instead, I just said "No." And he said two magic words. He said, "You should." And he might as well have said, "Open sesame" [audience chuckles] because that's the effect that those words had. There was like a whoosh of air and this big iron door of The New Yorker cracked open. Just this much, you best believe I slipped the tip of my boot into that gap faster than a caffeinated jackrabbit. [audience chuckles] I just went full Texan on you. I'm sorry, is everyone okay? [audience chuckles] 

 

Let's just move on. So, when I got back home, that's all I did, was cartoon. No more art, no more comedy. It was all about the mash up of those two things. My two greatest passions, and up till that point, my two most frustrating failures. So, for that week, I worked all these ideas. I took the best three, and I drew them up and I sent them to The New Yorker. I didn't hear anything back, so I did it again. Week two, nothing. Week three, nothing. Week four, nothing. Week five, I got a letter. Some of you remember those. It was a letter that said “I had sold a cartoon to The New Yorker magazine.” [cheers and applause] 

 

I don't know if I can explain how it felt, but if you can imagine being on your feet for seven years, walking and working and waiting and then somebody pushing up a nice big comfy chair, you wouldn't be far off. So, after you sell your first cartoon, you're allowed to come into the offices and deliver your batch of cartoons in person. So, I did that. I came all the way to New York City and I sat across the desk from Bob Mankoff and I handed him my three cartoons for the week. And that's when he told me that the rest of the cartoonists were doing 10 a week. Good to know. [audience chuckles] So, I was going to impress him. So, I went home and I started doing 15 a week every week. I did that for a full year. 15 every week.

 

And that first year, I sold four. [audience awe] But I was elated because I had finally found a place to be. I'd found my home. And I remember the very moment when I felt that, it was that first visit to The New Yorker. I'd seen Bob and I was coming down in the elevator all by myself, grinning ear to ear. I may have done a little jig. I'm not sure I can't verify. [audience chuckles] But I love to think that somewhere, in the basement of that building, there's some security camera footage of this 29-year-old kid, just smiling for no reason. And I get to the bottom and the doors open and there's George Booth standing there. And I reached out my hand and George is like 70, he's kind of tall, goofy, kind of graceful. He's from Missouri.

 

I'm looking at him and I'm thinking, "I'm hoping that I'm looking into my future." And I reach out my hand and I say, "Hi, Mr. Booth, I'm Matt Diffee. I just sold my first cartoon." And he said the perfect thing to me. He said-- he shook my hand and he kind of raised an eyebrow, goofy like that. And he said, "Well, welcome aboard." [audience laughter] And that's the very moment when I knew I'd finally found my seat. Thank you very much.