Still, maybe New Yorker cartoons do need a crazy fresh approach.

Dungeons were dark and nasty, but TV (and certain New Yorker cartoons, no doubt) had inoculated me against their reality.

ON Elisabeth Semel's bulletin board is a New Yorker cartoon that shows a man with a thick briefcase walking into an empty prison cell: "Hi, I'm your court-appointed lawyer," he announces.

LEAD: A New Yorker cartoon some years back showed an exasperated woman upbraiding her husband in a wine shop.

Every image here is done in the lush-but-lighthearted style that defines Farris's later work: these are New Yorker cartoons and covers, set in a war zone.

I recall a New Yorker cartoon that featured a man looking at pictures of world-famous destinations in a tourist office.

Some years back a New Yorker cartoon depicted a conventionally dressed father telling a small, disappointed-looking boy: "I'm sorry, son, we're just not the kind of people who have amusing license plates."

You ask me for two or favorite New Yorker cartoons, but I can't play favorites that way, and, anyway, it would be more like two or three hundred.

But now it is The New Yorker cartoon itself that will become the object of scientific study.

Why does The New Yorker cartoon persist?