Thirty years ago, while many of us were asking, “What is the internet?,” The New Yorker ran one of its most famous cartoons: the black-and-white single-panel “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” by Peter Steiner. Featuring two chatting dogs sitting in front of a desktop computer, it became the most reproduced cartoon in the long and distinguished history of the magazine that has counted among its cartoonists James Thurber, Roz Chast and Charles Addams.
The original drawing of the famous cartoon sold for $175,000 on Friday, Oct. 6 during Heritage Auctions “Illustration Art Signature Auction.” It is the highest price ever paid for a single-panel cartoon and a record-breaker for Steiner.
Since its publication in 1993, the cartoon became a prescient, profound and witty meme for the impact the internet has had on all of our lives during the digital revolution. Ironically, Steiner said the most famous cartoon about the internet was not about the fledgling worldwide web at all.
“It was about was about my sense that I’m getting away with something,” Steiner said in an interview before the auction. “I realized the cartoon is autobiographical and that it’s about being an imposter or feeling like an imposter. I’ve had several checkered careers, and in everyone, I felt like a bit of a fraud. I mean, I think many people have that syndrome, the sense that, yeah, I’ve got everybody fooled.”
Steiner drew more than 430 cartoons for The New Yorker, among them some of the magazine’s funniest, sharpest and most resonant. He’s since become a writer of spy novels and a painter. Steiner has long joked that no matter his ever-expanding résumé, he will one day be eulogized solely as the guy who drew “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
