Milwaukee’s Paul Noth doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t drawing and reading cartoons. And since the beginning, his own work has had a common thread: average characters, absurd situations.
Over the course of his career, Noth has published over 400 cartoons in The New Yorker. He was the 2025 winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor in Cartoon Art. His first published collection of cartoons comes out in the fall.
And now, The Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend is honoring him as its cartoonist laureate for Wisconsin.
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Noth is the very first to take on the role. He’ll act as an ambassador for the art form around the state and highlight Wisconsin’s important role in the history of American comics.
This 2010 cartoon was the inspiration for the title of Noth’s forthcoming collection, “I Am Going to Eat You… and Other Awkward Truths: A Cartoonist’s Romp Through the Lunacy of Our Times.” Illustration courtesy of Paul Noth
Noth joined WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” for a look at his career and what he hopes to achieve in his three years as cartoonist laureate.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kate Archer Kent: Where did your love of cartoons come from?
Paul Noth: It’s hard to say. Before I could even remember, they were just part of my consciousness, from the time I was a little kid. I was always drawing them, too.
Growing up in Milwaukee, there was a great comics section in the Milwaukee Journal. It was called the Green Sheet. It was literally printed on green paper. That was my favorite part of the newspaper and my favorite part of the day. My father worked there — he was the movie critic and the feature editor at the (Milwaukee) Journal, so he would bring home cartoon books that came across the feature desk for me, too.
I never really expected to do it for a living, even though I loved it so much. (My father) kind of warned me, “This industry is in trouble. You don’t want to go into the newspaper business.” And so I didn’t think print journalism would ever be a thing for me. But that just happened to be the way that it worked out.
A 2014 comic by Paul Noth. Illustration courtesy of Paul Noth
KAK: How did you begin cartooning for The New Yorker, and how has it influenced your work?
PN: I grew up with such a knowledge of it and its history, and I knew it was the hardest place to ever possibly get into. So I never even tried until I met a New Yorker cartoonist. I was living in New York, and I brought some of my other writing to a monthly show called The Rejection Show because I hadn’t been able to sell any of my writing at all. This was a live show where people would bring in their best rejected material, and that’s where I met a cartoonist named Matt Diffee, who’s a great New Yorker cartoonist and children’s author. And I showed him some of my work, and he really encouraged me to submit.
When you do that, they strongly recommend you do 10 cartoons a week, and it’s a very good week if you sell one. So it’s a lot of rejection, but the discipline of doing that in the single panel format, I really took to it right away. It helped me focus it, it limited my options. And for me, that is a great way to work.
A 2010 comic by Paul Noth. Illustration courtesy of Paul Noth
KAK: As part of your role as cartoonist laureate, you’ll be teaching cartooning workshops for kids this summer. What kind of advice do you give to young cartoonists?
PN: I do this project with them that I call the “bad idea notebook” project. And that’s based on the way I work. We have a notebook that just says “bad ideas” on the front, and that frees you up. You’re not trying to be good, you’re just trying to write down and draw as many bad ideas as you can, which is literally the actual way I work. I just keep my pen or pencil going and write down thoughts and doodle pictures, and I don’t worry about whether they’re any good or not. Somehow, through doing that, you plant enough seeds that something grows that you actually like.
Go for volume. And most of all, be free and get over the inner censor. Stop shutting yourself down before you’ve had the idea.
KAK: Where do you find inspiration for your work?
PN: It can come from anywhere. It can come from conversation or a book I’m reading. In the morning, I like to get up and just write down a couple of ideas. Not because they’re good ideas, but just to remind myself what I do and to turn my cartoon brain on. And then the antenna will be up and I will pick up on things in conversations, or little visual ideas will come to me, and I’ll be like, “Maybe that’s something that’s worth writing down.” The thing about humor is that it’s surprising when it works. So I have to sort of be open to it from anywhere.