“I am not just constantly sitting in my rocker, slapping my knee, chortling.” Emma Allen, The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, answers our burning questions about how the magazine picks its gags—and what makes a joke funny.”

Emma Allen has a weird job. For nearly a decade, she has served as The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, which means she decides which funny drawings run alongside the words in our pages, and which are incinerated upon arrival, never to see the light of day. (A fun fact: The New Yorker was founded, a hundred and one years ago, as a fifteen-cent “comic paper.”)

Of all the decisions that get made here each day—which commas go where, who should write about what—the process of selecting and editing the cartoons is one of the more high-stakes ones. I asked Allen if she’d answer a few questions about how it all works. She agreed, and we discussed how she weeds through submissions, plus what makes something funny. (Please don’t send her any more jokes about astronauts wanting to get as far away from Earth as possible. She gets it.)

The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

By noon every Tuesday, more than a hundred cartoonists have e-mailed me their weekly “batches” of approximately ten cartoons each. I’m thankfully bad at math so my brain just beep-boop shuts down while computing how many cartoons that is—but it’s a lot. I look at all those sketches in essentially one sitting, and then scream and scream, which none of my co-workers mind. From the thousand-ish roughs I get each week, I pick around sixty to show the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, and, of those sixty, we buy around fifteen. So, as I understand it—beep-boop—great odds!

Also, every morning, by 9 A.M., I receive Daily Cartoon submissions. Those are timely responses to the news of the moment, which will run online, A.S.A.P. As you can imagine, they are all hilarious, because the news is a laugh riot.

Well, I already covered the screaming. Sometimes, there’s also the rending of a sweater? Confession: all that was a lie. But, a truth: I listen to this Timo Andres performance of Philip Glass music over and over and over and over, while looking at cartoons. I’m dead serious about that. Ask Nick Trautwein, the editor who shares an office wall with me, whom I imagine prefers Philip Glass to the screams. [Editor’s note: Over e-mail, Trautwein told us that he does not recall ever hearing a sound through the wall, and that he’d “probably prefer the screaming to Philip Glass.”]

I know exactly how useless this is as advice, but what makes a cartoon stand out to me is some element that totally catches me off guard, and knocks me out of my cartoon-reviewing-marathon stupor. The cartoonists might try to deny this, but a lot of the jokes I see are familiar. This week, everyone was making the same joke about astronauts not wanting to come home from space, which—fair. But we’ve run similar gags! Because, it turns out, being in zero gravity with a floating jar of Nutella is pretty much preferable to most terrestrial things.

Once, a reporter asked me if I was going to pick different cartoons than my cartoon-editor predecessors, because they were men and I’m a woman, and I said, “I’m going to only pick cartoons about menstruation.” First and foremost and forever, I’m looking for diverse voices and artistic styles that surprise and delight, but I’ll say it: comedy is subjective, and I’m also allowed to pick things that just make me laugh. Thankfully, I’ve always been fascinated by a really wide spectrum of comedy, so, while I don’t care about golf at all, readers will get an occasional golf cartoon, amid the menstruation content. You’re welcome.

It’s a pretty secretive, almost papal process. But let me state, for the record, that Mr. Ripley-ing me is not an option.

I will never again go to a party and not have someone complain about not having won the Cartoon Caption Contest. Which is barely even my fault! But we’ll save that for another newsletter…

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Here is a direct link to the complete interview.