Get to know the droll wit of Bruce Kaplan

No One You Know: A Collection of Cartoons
by Bruce Eric Kaplan. Simon & Schuster. 189 pages. $13.95.

     Readers of the New Yorker will instantly recognize cartoons signed "BEK," each initial framed by its own rectangle. Though Bruce Eric Kaplan's work has been appearing weekly in the magazine since 1991, his clear black lines and droll wit are already distinctly New Yorker cartoons.
     The small, empty-circle eyes may be straight out of Harold Gray's "Little Orphan Annie," but the strong-willed characters, odd juxtapositions, and matter-of-fact absurdities make Kaplan heir to New Yorker greats Peter Arno, James Thurber, and William Steig.
     A cat frowns at a dog who sits on the floor, reading, his back against the couch. Looking up from his book, the dog retorts, "Of course I understand it. It's just some Grisham potboiler." Or, her hands gesturing for emphasis, one five-year old complains to another: "And then, as soon as I had carved out my niche, they went and had another kid." In another panel, a wife stands with one hand on her hip and points declaratively with the other. To her obviously defeated husband, she asserts, "If Neil Simon's going to keep writing them, we're going to keep seeing them."
     Simon liked this cartoon so much that he wrote the book's introduction, and Jerry Seinfeld so admired Kaplan's work as a writer for "Seinfeld" that he contributed a blurb to the cover. Add my endorsement to theirs: "No One You Know" presents a wry artist worth getting to know.
         
PHIL NEL
     (Phil Nel is a visiting instructor of English at the College of Charleston.)