In Their Own Words: Carolita Johnson

Note: This is the first in a series of entries in which New Yorker artists describe the inspiration behind their drawings, in their own words.

Part comedienne, part fitting model (a seamstress’s dream), Carolita Johnson is one of The New Yorker’s youngest and most outspoken female cartoonists. Never one to mince her words, Carolita recently told me the inspiration behind two of her popular cartoons:

"I paid three grand for this dress, I'll wear it wherever I want!"

Okay, so! For the wedding dress cartoon, the story is that in a ploy to try to make me feel guilty enough to hurry up and find a man to get married to, my mom once said to me that she’d like to see me in a wedding dress before she dies. I thought, well, the only way she’ll ever see me in a wedding dress is if I wear one on a regular basis as if it were just an ordinary dress. And then I thought, hey, if I were gonna spend 3,000 bucks on a dress, I’d damn well wear it anywhere and everywhere till I got my money’s worth! And that’s where that cartoon comes from.

(Side note: This cartoon appeared in the credits of the 2008 movie 27 Dresses with Katherine Heigl.)

"What's the matter? Not puffy enough for you?"

For the “puffy enough” cartoon, I’ve always found pigeons to be the most annoying birds ever, in particular when they’re in that mating mode, where the male puffs himself up and aggressively pursues the harried females. The females always look like they’d love to file a harassment suit against those puffy males. And the males always look so macho and frustrated, as if they were thinking, “What’s wrong with these stuck-up broads? You’d think I wasn’t puffy enough for them!” And voila! That’s where that one came from.

For more of Carolita’s original humor, visit her blog at http://newyorkette.com. Carolita is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post.