Handelsman died of lung cancer at his home in Southampton, N.Y., the New Yorker said on Tuesday.
He created 950 cartoons and five covers for the magazine between 1961 and 2006, many of them with a distinctive wry twist. Handelsman's legacy "has as much to do with writing as it does with drawing," Nancy Franklin writes in a remembrance in the current issue of the magazine. Handelsman used his captions to highlight popular trends and puncture hypocrisy.
In one 1968 cartoon, an audience member at a string quartet concert says to his companion, "It's dull now, but at the end they smash their instruments and set fire to the chairs." In a 2003 cartoon, a businessman in a corporate boardroom says, "We are among those chosen to bear the burden of rebuilding Iraq. A thankless job, with no reward apart from obscene profits.
" New Yorker editor David Remnick described Handelsman's work as a combination of editorial cartooning and traditional black and white New Yorker cartoon. "At its best, his work had political bite and, at the same time, a real humanity and wit. Everyone at the magazine — editors, writers, artists and readers — will miss him and will miss his unique voice," Remnick said.
Born John Bernard Handelsman in the Bronx in 1922, Handelsman was known informally as Bud. He studied at the Art Students League and at New York University. He worked for several years as a freelance graphic designer, then moved to England where he took up cartooning full time.
His work has been published in Playboy and for 11 years, he produced a full-page weekly feature called for Punch, the British humour magazine. He has also illustrated many books, including Families and How to Survive Them and Life and How to Survive It , both by John Cleese and Robin Skynner, and by David Frost and Michael Shea. He is survived by his wife, the former Gertrude Peck, three children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
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