Bruce Eric Kaplan
Bruce Eric Kaplan
Bruce Eric Kaplan, known as BEK, is an American cartoonist whose single-panel cartoons frequently appear in The New Yorker. His cartoons are known for their signature simple style and often dark humor. Kaplan is also a screenwriter and has worked on Seinfeld and on Six Feet Under. Kaplan wove his New Yorker cartooning into Seinfeld with the episode "The Cartoon." He graduated from Wesleyan University and studied there with Professor Jeanine Basinger...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth9 September 1964
CountryUnited States of America
My mother couldn't take having three boys. She was extremely jumpy, to say the least. Any noise startled her. The sound of a pot dropping on the ground could make her hit the ceiling.
James Thurber was an inspiration because his drawings were so primitive. I am self-taught - I didn't go to art school - so I thought when I started doing them, 'If James Thurber can be a cartoonist, I can,' because his stuff is very raw.
I thought about trying to do a strip. I even tried to do it, but I felt I didn't have the voice. Even though I liked that form, I didn't think I thought in the form of the three panels.
My cartoon life is in my office, and it's very separate and getting very in my own head. My television life is I'm begging one of the actors to say the line in the way I'd like them to.
What I like about graduation speeches is that they're an opportunity for someone to make sense of their life and to impart that wisdom to someone else. It's like a sanctioned self-help moment.
When I'm on the set, I'll come up with ideas if I'm sort of just between responsibilities, because there's a lot of sitting around on set. Invariably, though, the stuff I come up with on the set tends to be bad.
One quintessential moment in time is when you're 22, when you graduate college. And then another quintessential time is as a middle-age man. That's the convergence.
Of course I loved 'I Love Lucy' and saw every episode over and over again. I found it heartbreaking that Ricky got to be famous and have an exciting life at the Tropicana while Lucy was stuck in that terrible apartment with the Mertzes.
When I was a kid, and I was watching TV, I just loved it so much that I wanted to crawl into that TV.
We are all just little dolls of ourselves. Who occasionally pull back the curtains to reveal the real us.
Yes, the people I draw don't have a wide variety of looks. Every now and then I'll spruce it up, like a woman will be wearing a two-piece suit as opposed to a one-piece, or a man will not be wearing a tie; he'll just have a collar.
Traditionally, the only way I come up with cartoons is by sitting at my desk and thinking.
When I was a kid, I would be watching TV shows like, you know, like 'Get Smart' and be like, 'That's what being an adult is.'
There was never any butter in our home. Just margarine. My parents acted like butter was lethal. I don't think I ever saw either one have a piece of butter. I would go over to friends' houses and down sticks of butter.