Sam Gross, whose cartoons ripped jokes from frogs’ legs, fairy tales, cats, aliens and cavemen, sparking belly laughs whether gracing the pages of The New Yorker or dispelling ideas of taste in National Lampoon, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He turned 89.
The cause was complications from heart failure, said Pat Giles, a fellow executor of his estate.
Mr. Gross was productive; even towards the end of his life, Mr. Giles said, he came up with up to 17 cartoon ideas a week, and his total lifetime was more than 33,800 rough and finished cartoons. In addition to The New Yorker and National Lampoon, he sold his work to Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, greeting card companies and lightly pornographic men’s magazines. His adaptability, he said, was a key to his longevity.
“I was never part of any scene except my scene,” Mr. Gross said in a 2011 interview with The Comics Journal. “That’s one of the reasons I survived.”
As a New York cartoonist, Mr. Gross was widely ranked among giants like Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg, as well as more contemporary stars like Roz Chast. Bob Mankoff, the former cartoon editor of The New Yorker who worked with Mr. Gross for decades, said in a telephone interview that he was “in the pantheon,” adding, “No one has ever done funnier cartoons than Sam Gross.”
As National Lampoon’s cartoonist since 1970, and cartoon editor of the magazine for several years, Mr. Gross teamed up with artists like Gahan Wilson (who, like Mr. Gross, also flourished at The New Yorker) and Rick Meyerowitz to create humor in which everything from race to gender to disability was fair game for a joke.
And while there are flavor lines that many cartoonists won’t cross, Mr. Gross jumped over them, doused them in gasoline and set them on fire, cackling as he did.
A stiff-legged dog lies on its back next to a blind man holding a sign that reads, “I am blind and my dog is dead.” A giant beanstalk grows out of the backside of a medieval farmer, and another farmer says, “I told you they were magic beans and you shouldn’t eat them.” Diners sit in front of a billboard advertising frog legs in a restaurant as a despondent legless amphibian rolls out of the kitchen. Some of his cartoons cannot be fully described in a family newspaper.
“Sam was so fantastically blasphemous,” said Mr. Meyerowitz, the author of “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead” (2010), a colorful history of the Lampoon, in a telephone interview. Mr. Gross, he added, “hated people saying, ‘Oh, you can’t say that,’ when he knew he could.”
But the point for Mr. Gross was not just to shock people, but to make them laugh. “He didn’t mean to offend,” Mr. Mankoff said. “but the purpose of a cartoon should never be that it is not offensive.”
His cartoons delighted readers even when dealing with less grotesque or taboo subjects.
A smiling cat pulls a mouse in a toy car. Another mouse yells, “For God’s sake, think! Why is he being so nice to you?”
A cow jumps over the moon. Another cow watching from a pasture says to a calf, “Son, your mother is a remarkable woman.”
The first New Yorker cartoon of Mr. Gross, which featured a woman staring at a boy chasing a wind-up bus past her bus stop, was published in 1969; his last appeared in February. He published more than 400 cartoons there during the more than five decades in between.
Mr. Gross had a less instantly recognizable visual style than George Booth’s kinetic lines or Edward Koren’s rugged drawings. (Mr. Booth and Mr. Koren, his fellow star cartoonists at The New Yorker, died in the past few months; Bruce McCall, a satirical artist whose work appeared in both The New Yorker and National Lampoon, died last Friday.)
Mr. Gross’ drawing style consisted of elegant simplicity in the service of joke.
In an obituary for The New Yorker, Emma Allen, the magazine’s current cartoon editor, called his work “a tightrope walk of economics — dangerously reaching maximum hilarity in the slightest of moves.”
A man at a gathering opens the door to the Grim Reaper and says, “I hope you’re here for the circumcision.”
Two witches stir a bubbling cauldron. One says, “I am writing a memoir. They are mainly recipes.”
Mr. Gross, speaking in a hoarse Bronx accent and stooping slightly from decades hunched over the drawing board, was a mentor and advocate for other cartoonists, who were quick to point out emphatically what he saw as injustices in the cartooning company. Mr Meyerowitz said he was pushing for royalty payments for cartoonists; Mr Mankoff said he refused to sell cartoons to outlets, such as Playboy, who completely controlled the rights to them.
In addition, Mr. Gross said he never changed his style just to sell cartoons.
“My work hasn’t changed because of The New Yorker,” he said in 2011. “I don’t do things for The New Yorker; I do things for myself.”
Samuel Harry Gross was born on August 7, 1933 in the Bronx to Max and Sophie (Goldberg) Gross, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father was an accountant, his mother a housewife.
After attending DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, he graduated from City College of New York, where he studied business, accounting and advertising.
Mr Gross told The Comics Journal that his first published cartoon appeared in Saturday Review in 1953 and that his first book of cartoons, “Cartoons for the GI”, was published after he was drafted into the army in 1954.
His other cartoon books include “I Am Blind, and My Dog Is Dead” (1977), “More Gross” (1982), and “We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons” (2008). His frog-leg cartoon appeared on the covers of National Lampoon’s 1977 comedy album, That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick! and the program for the touring show that followed.
After serving in Germany for two years, Mr. Gross back to the United States. He briefly worked as an accountant and saved his money, and in 1959 he married Isabelle Jaffe. She survives him, as does their daughter, Michelle Gross, and a sister, Sarita Abrahams.
After they got married, the Grosses moved to Darmstadt, Germany, near Frankfurt, where Mr. Gross sold cartoons to European publications. After about a year, they moved back to New York, where Mr. Gross submitted cartoons to The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as less respectable magazines like Rascal. In the early 1960s, he was able to earn a full-time income as a cartoonist.
Mr. Gross was a meticulous bookkeeper, which he attributed to his accounting background. He kept all of his cartoons, numbered and organized in large black binders, with copies sorted by subject, in a studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
He was also outspoken and let people know when he disagreed with them. Mr. Mankoff said that Mr. Gross flatly refused to enter The New Yorker’s subtitle contest, in which readers submit subtitle ideas for a cartoon:
“He basically said, ‘If you don’t let anyone write the last paragraph of an Updike article, you’re not doing anything with my caption.'”