Font of social satire:Haefeli says, "It's the joke first and then the composition." photo:Robert J. Bliwise

ou can find William Haefeli in the pits. Or at least you can find him in the neighborhood of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. There, as a city guidebook reports, "a large pool of smelly tar (la brea in Spanish) surrounds full-size models of mastodons struggling to free themselves from the grimy muck, a re-creation of prehistoric times, when such creatures tried to drink from the thin layer of water covering the tar in the pits, only to become entrapped."

And week after week, you can find Haefeli '75 far from the grimy muck--though happy to indulge in his own gentle form of muckraking--in the rarified pages of The New Yorker as a contributing cartoonist.

Over lunch at a restaurant that nearly overlooks the pits, I resolve to make a close study of Haefeli humor. A tuna-melt sandwich will be his lunch choice--a funny choice, indeed. I ask him if he has decoded the meaning of life. He puts his face to the tape recorder and declares that the meaning of life is anyplace but the relentless restaurant soundtrack; at the moment, "Unchain My Heart" is playing in the background. I see an opportunity for a follow-up question: Does the possible secession of Hollywood from greater L.A. signal something about the chaotic nature of civilization? "No," he says, obviously a man of firm opinions.

Then a revelation: As a kid growing up in Philadelphia's Main Line, he consumed The New Yorker, for the cartoons alone (along with Charles Schulz's Peanuts). "I was eight or nine. I had no interest in the articles, except for the movie reviews." He was drawn particularly to Charles Saxon, a cartoonist for the magazine in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, who impressed the impressionable Haefeli with his contemporary, sophisticated portrayals of urbanities and suburbanites.

© 2002 the new yorker collection from cartoonbank.com. all rights reserved

© 2002 the new yorker collection from cartoonbank.com. all rights reserved

Haefeli was among seven or so of his high-school classmates who enrolled at Duke--so Duke was, in his words, an "excellent but conventional" choice. And was Duke funny in the early Seventies? "No. Not even remotely." He was a psychology major, and in the extracurricular arena, he found a place on the traffic appeals board. Was he accommodating of pleas for mercy? "Well, by the letter of the law, nobody had a good excuse." Was he worried about his peers getting mad at him? "No. I had the law on my side." Could he have been bribed in the appeals process? "No. Nobody I knew had any money." The college-age Haefeli doesn't sound quick to buck authority.

He was, though, learning something about human behavior. "I figured I would become a psychologist," he says, "that I would be one of those people who ran hidden-camera social psychology experiments on people." Serving as an experimental subject was a requirement for the major. That wasn't very funny, or very fun. He revised his figuring and revived an artistic interest; he took courses in art, including advanced drawing and advanced painting. He didn't do any campus cartoon production as such, but he says, "My drawing and paintings evolved into very cartoon-like images."

That craving for cartooning hadn't been so much dormant as beaten back, he explains. Steered away from making "an inappropriate career choice for an actual human being of any intelligence," he had stopped taking art courses in junior high school. "I had a number of art teachers whose attitude was, basically, that if you did a project the way they wanted it, they'd give you an A. If you did it the way you wanted it, they'd give you a B. That discouraged me from any formal art training, and I stopped completely until junior year of college."

So there's the essence of the younger, pre-tuna-melt Haefeli: a rebel discouraged out of his passions. "Well, that's putting words in my mouth, but that's all right," he says between mouthfuls. Then he rethinks that characterization. "I'd never call myself a rebel because, if I had been a rebel, I would have put up more of a stink instead of just giving up art." A more rebellious type, that is, would have presided over the smelly tar pits of junior high, putting those fossilized teachers in their place, as it were. So there's the real essence of the younger Haefeli: not a rebel but quietly resilient and unfazed by junior-high trauma. "I just believe in biding my time."

In Haefeli's time at Duke, art professor Vernon Pratt nurtured his cartooning style. "I was actually sort of reluctant to adopt it. He said to just go for it. He was very good at getting us to be self-directed and to chart our own course as artists--unlike the instructors I'd had in junior high school. As long as we could demonstrate that we'd grown from one painting to the next, and that we were making some sort of progression or experimentation as artists, then he was fine with whatever direction we went in."

After graduation, Haefeli attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts for two and a half years as a "student at large"; the school itself wasn't an enduring work of art, and it folded shortly after he left. "It taught me some more specific techniques and how to get across an idea, so that my intentions would be understood by whoever was looking at my artwork. It gave me a lot of mechanical tools that I could play with artistically--contrasts between light and dark, color experimentation, that sort of stuff."