“Women Laughing” Tells Story of Women Cartoonists at The New Yorker

Around a table at the Algonquin Hotel, a group of women cartoonists sit drawing as they talk, occasionally glancing up at one another, then back down to the page. The mood is relaxed and the act of drawing seems to loosen the conversation. Hands keep moving as ideas and stories fill the air.

That experience is central to “Women Laughing,” a new documentary produced and co-directed by American cartoonist and writer Liza Donnelly. The film screens on Sunday, March 8, at 3 p.m. at the LeFrak Theatre at Barnard Hall on the final day of the Athena Film Festival which celebrates women’s leadership through narrative, documentary and short films. The 2026 event features curated, woman-centered stories, including films like Charliebird, Happy Birthday, and Lesbian Space Princess

Donnelly, who has drawn for The New Yorker for more than forty years, serves as both guide and participant in “Women Laughing.” She grew up during the upheavals of the 1950s and ’60s, when expectations for women were rigid and unspoken. She said her interest in cartooning began when her drawings made her mother laugh. She grew up aware that her mother had come of age at a time when many women’s ambitions went unrealized, so her laughter was a sort a of moment of liberation

At that point, Donnelly says she was hooked. “Humor relies on the traditions of a society. It takes what we know and twists it,” she says. Because women are often expected to uphold social norms, they tend to know those rules particularly well, which makes humor an effective way to challenge them.

The film traces how that dynamic played out at The New Yorker, a magazine that published a cartoon by a woman in its very first issue in 1925, but by the 1950s and ’60s, women cartoonists had almost disappeared entirely from its pages. Their return in the 1970s, including Donnelly herself, coincided with cultural shifts, but came with its own compromises. Feminist voices often softened themselves to fit a male-dominated editorial culture of the time.

For younger cartoonists today, the landscape is quite different. Amy Hwang, who has drawn cartoons for The New Yorker since 2010, recalls being one of the few women showing up in person to weekly cartoon meetings early in her career. Over time, that changed. “As time went on, there were more women,” Hwang says, noting that the arrival of Emma Allen as the magazine’s first female cartoon editor accelerated that shift. More voices entered the mix, including male, female, and nonbinary perspectives.

Hwang resists the idea that humor itself is gendered. “I don’t think a sense of humor is gender-specific,” she says. “But depending on your perspective in life, you might come up with different types of cartoons.” She argues that a single-panel cartoon succeeds when the artist selects an ordinary, familiar moment and uses it to reveal and comment on the absurdity of a common, shared life experience.

That compression is something Emily Flake, another New Yorker cartoonist featured in the film, describes in almost architectural terms. Humor, she says, begins with a swerve. “You set up a legible reality as efficiently as possible,” Flake explains, “and then subvert it.” The laugh arrives when the body realizes the surprise is not a threat.

At Athena, a festival dedicated to rethinking women’s leadership and power, “Women Laughing” fits the line up quite naturally. It suggests that humor, when wielded with precision and patience, can do more than entertain. It can keep a record of what rules existed, who enforced them, and how they got bent.