Who is Roz Chast, and what makes her cartoons so damn funny?
The cartoonist and illustrator Roz Chast (b. 1954, Brooklyn) observes American urban and suburban life much as a space alien taking inventory on the sundry and strange things she encounters in her travels. She is a taxonomist of the trivial, and though her renderings are often absurdist and fantastical takes on everyday life, they are rooted in the habits and mores of modern culture. In training her spotlight so fixedly on tiny things and average people, she is doing something radical: she is making visible the invisible customs we take for granted, overlook, or simply ignore, and in so doing, showing us our own peculiarity. Her observations ring entirely true, and we laugh as much at her cartoons as at ourselves, because it is embarrassingly easy to locate ourselves in her creations. The cover of one of Chast’s earliest books, Unscientific Americans (1982), features an assemblage of numbered cards each with a supremely average person, and in one case, a cat, with the heading, “Collect
