Life & Wisdom Quote by Bruce McCall

McCall’s line lands like a polite compliment with a wink: admiration is framed not as taste, but as incapacity. It’s a tiny inversion of the usual brag. Instead of “I love cartoons because they’re brilliant,” he offers “I love cartoons because I’m locked out of them.” That self-limitation is the joke and the key. Cartoons look effortless when they work; the craft hides in plain sight. By admitting he “can’t do cartoons,” McCall quietly restores their difficulty, puncturing the cultural habit of treating illustration and humor as lesser arts because they read quickly.

The subtext is a creative person’s envy, but also a defense of specialization. McCall, an author, points to the specific kind of intelligence cartoons demand: compression, timing, visual economy, the ability to make an idea legible in a glance without over-explaining it. Writers can ramble, revise, qualify. Cartoonists don’t get that luxury. The line nods to the brutal constraint: one frame, one shot, and the joke either survives or dies.

Contextually, it’s also a sly comment on status. “Cartoons” carry a whiff of the disposable, the Sunday-page, the doodle. McCall flips that hierarchy. His admiration isn’t condescending; it’s aspirational. The punch is that creative humility becomes a form of criticism: if you can’t do it, maybe it’s not simple. It’s craft disguised as play, and he’s sharp enough to admit he’s not fluent.