Last year, the recipe was simple: Curator David Ostow gathered a bevy of New Yorker cartoonists and asked them each for a few of their favorite pieces that the magazine had rejected. The resulting show, "Not Ok: Great Cartoons that Weren’t Good Enough," hung in Brooklyn from September to December before moving to the Rye Free Reading Room in Westchester where it remained throughout January. With a write-up in The New York Times, a jam-packed opening reception and a televised panel featuring several of the cartoonists discussing their work, the show was, by all metrics, a success.

This year the basics are the same — but with a twist. Fledgling New Yorker cartoonist Navied Mahdavian will take the torch from Ostow and carry it to Mackay, Idaho, where he’ll be mounting "Not Ok: Wild West Edition." A small, rural town of 500 people, Mackay wouldn’t seem like an obvious venue for an exhibition of New Yorker cartoons. But several people in this community, including Mahdavian and his wife Emelie, a filmmaker, have begun a campaign to cultivate the arts in their small town. Their hope is to bring vibrancy back to the heart of a mining town that was once more than double its current size, and also to provide a venue for residents of a very remote area to connect with the outside world through the arts. Their efforts include the rehabilitation of Mackay’s Art Deco movie theater — the sole theater in a county the size of Connecticut and largely defunct for 30 years — as a community-run indie cinema and the development of the adjoining soda shop as an all-purpose exhibition space.

"Not Ok: Wild West Edition," which will open Sept. 15, will include 20 New Yorker cartoonists bringing their “East Coast humor” to the Wild West. Culling through their mountains of rejections, the artists will be eschewing classic urban tropes like subways, rats and tiny apartments in favor of cartoons that will appeal to a rural population — from cowboys and crickets, to cats and coffee (because some things are just universally funny). To help contextualize the exhibit, the theater will be showing Leah Wolchok’s Emmy-winning film "Very Semi-Serious," a behind-the-scenes documentary of The New Yorker cartoon department.

At a time when America feels more divided than ever, perhaps comedy can bridge the gap. To show that there is more that unites us. To show that things will be fine. More than O.K.