LOS ANGELES — A woman holding a martini turns to a garishly dressed man and says, “I thought I’d never laugh again. Then I saw your jacket.”

Through that cartoon — the first published by The New Yorker in the weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks — Leo Cullum gently gave the magazine’s readers permission to laugh again.

His role “was to tell us that laughter was not only permissible but necessary,” Robert Mankoff, The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, told the Los Angeles Times in an e-mail.

Cullum, a longtime resident of Malibu, died Saturday of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said his wife, Kathy. He was 68.

Although he was a celebrated cartoonist, Cullum was also a commercial airline pilot who retired in 2002 after 34 years of flying. Cartooning “looked like something I could do,” he once said, so he bought some how-to books and taught himself the craft between flights.

Since 1977, the magazine has published more than 815 of his cartoons, which lean toward absurd gags and often feature cats and dogs. They also excel at the marriage of image and words, a New Yorker hallmark.

Cullum was known as one of the most consistent and accessible gagmen in the magazine’s history, according to the online publication the Comics Reporter. “Cullum is one of the great cartoonists not merely because he was so consistently good,” Mankoff said. Although “you will like some better than others … rarely will you find any that are not funny. That is very hard, and he makes it look easy, which is my definition of great.”