Reaction to Cartoons
I see that Thurber’s cartoons are dry and it takes a certain sort of humor to immediately appreciate them. I think that after one reads them and studies them briefly, they can still be appreciated regardless of any humor, primarily because many of them are universal in their own way. Thurber, known for showing men who overstep their boundaries in one way or another, and women who are not going to put up with it, managed to clue into this vein with the American public time and time again.
One panel shows an obviously drunk man who has managed to stumble home with a rabbit without knowing why, he appears to be a magician, there is a woman who we presume to be his wife fuming on the other side of the panel. It seems that this is hilarious whether one is married, in a relationship, or has even made a significant other angry by being drunk or not because many of us by adulthood have angered a friend or significant other, or had somebody anger us why intoxicated. In my opinion, it is relatable and true, and therefore, funny.
Another panel shows an obviously terrified man on stand for trial. The judge looks angry and the cross-examining prosecutor is holding a kangaroo as evidence. We are not even sure it is a kangaroo due to Thurber’s poor artistic abilities. A good quote is, “Maybe this will refresh your memory.” Who knows what the trial is about, or why the kangaroo is there, but the prosecutor is sure it will clinch the case based on the look on his face. It takes us a moment to realize it is perhaps the sheer absurdity of an Australian marsupial in open court, being used as pivotal evidence that is so funny.
In a separate cartoon, Thurber shows his obvious artistic limitations, featuring his ex-wife on top of a bookshelf, and his current wife down on the floor beside him. The people in the drawing are hilariously one-dimensional and crude, and the bookshelf was not even intended to be in the drawing, but was featured because Thurber lacked the basic skills to draw a staircase. I feel that the fact that he did not let this limit him and instead went with it, drawing his classically styled angry woman on top of a bookshelf and dubbing her an ex-wife makes the panel funnier. Moreover, it appears the man discarded his ex-wife like one would an old book or a forgotten photo. These elements detract slightly from the hilariousness of the panel, adding an element of depth. We do, in our own way, try to discard the past as quickly as possibly despite how strongly it lingers. Though Thurber meant to create an entirely different cartoon, he managed to make something funny that also speaks to the inner voice in all of us that perhaps wishes our past did not feel as though it was hovering on the top of every shelf.
In conclusion, many of the panels show the dryness of Thurber’s humor. For example, some of his jokes do not seem like jokes at all, but rather strange cartoons with unrelated one-liners that need to be examined further. In one particular panel he expresses everything from a man expressing he heard a seal bark (there is indeed a seal peeking out over the back of the bed’s headboard), and discussing how the wine was “bred” as a group sit down to dinner. While taking into account that he was creating cartoons for The New Yorker, it makes the panels more hilarious because it is almost as if he is making fun of the reader base. However, he cannot be simply because the punchlines are not always obvious. The poor quality of the art created an untraditional cartoon collection for the magazine, but many of the jokes, once assessed, held the same satirical value as other cartoons and articles of the 1940’s and 1950’s.
