Mort Gerberg

For the Playboy Blog, Jennifer Thiele interviewed Mort Gerberg, New Yorker cartoonist and editor of the recently-released Last Laughs: Cartoons About Aging, Retirement ... and the Great Beyond.

The opening of the interview:

Playboy: What were you thinking when you came up with the idea for this book?

Gerberg: The inspiration came after a ski trip in Salt Lake City. I saw an older man who announced that he had just skied for free because it was his eightieth birthday. I’m cheap and I want to ski for free, so I thought that was a great goal. People are continuing to be very active well into their older years. I play tennis with people in their 70s. People are living longer, but instead of being in denial about aging and death we should embrace and laugh about it.

Playboy: You were born in Brooklyn and live in Manhattan. Has being a born-and-bred New Yorker affected your humor?

Gerberg: My humor usually arises from being annoyed at something. You don’t do cartoons about something easy, fun or pleasant and there are many more things to be annoyed at living in New York City like noise, dirt, slow people and traffic. There’s always something to get pissed off at here. How can you make fun of things while lying on the beach in the sun, staring at an azure sky?

Read the full interview.

--Marshal Zeringue