Biography
Margie Cherry didn’t set out to help create a new brand of humor. She set out to save her own sanity, spare her family her neurotic angst, and to kvetch a little to let off steam. So she doodled her anxieties, frustrations, and feelings of maternal failure in a notebook and then tried to persuade greeting card companies to turn her illustrations into a line of cards for overwhelmed moms. Card companies were not interested. It was 1990. Motherhood, of the irreverent kind, was not yet a hot commodity.
Before the internet gave birth to the screaming triplets of Mommy Blogs, Mommy Products and Mommy Culture (and almost before the birth of the internet itself), Margie was giving birth to two daughters and a new kind of humor she dubbed “Mom-Com” first with her groundbreaking cartoon “The Art of Motherhood” then with her stand-up “Momedy” act (which she had to give up because of all the vomiting…on her part as well as the audience’s) and lastly with her popular seminars, “Mom’s Comedy Workshop” where she taught moms to save their own sanity by creating comedy to deal with stresses of parenthood. There was considerably less spit-up involved.
By 2004, with her kids nearly grown and therefore less to groan about, she put down her pen and ink and quietly retired from cartooning, having just about broken even with her neighborhood art supply pusher. Although her cartoons were included in four humor anthologies and appeared frequently in the national humor monthly The Funny Times, the world never quite took notice of this thing called mom-com.
Five years later there were 23 million moms reading or writing mommy-blogs every week, with advertisers pouring buckets of money into their sticky little peanut-buttered hands. It’s one thing to miss the boat. It’s another to be at the dock, ready and waiting, before the boat is even built, let alone arrived. It’s great to be a pioneer–isn’t it?
Margie gave up comedy for career counseling and now finds deep satisfaction in working with clients who do as they’re told, rarely sass her in public, and never, ever wipe their snotty little noses on her favorite shirt.
She lives outside of Philadelphia with her husband Ivan Kimmelman, and her cat Sylvie.
Her daughters are grown, and she assumes that having made them the subject of her cartoons for most of their early years as she mocked motherhood is the reason they have both moved to Brooklyn. She misses them terribly.
Follow Margie on Twitter
Follow Margie on Facebook
Margie’s Website
email: [email protected]
Click on the book images for more information on Margie Cherry and Mom’s Comedy Coloring Book