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What’s Funny About That?
posted February 11, 2005
 

Creators: Various
Publishing Info: E.P. Dutton, 1954, 124 Pages
Ordering Numbers:

I picked up a copy of What's Funny About That? at my local Friends of the Library sale last weekend for I think 50 cents. It's a hardback collection of cartoons found in This Week magazine, which I thought might be interesting because I'm not familiar with the magazine -- even though it once claimed the world's largest circulation at 15 million -- and I'm not all that familiar with gag cartooning. Really, the bulk of gag cartooning that survives does so by tenuous connection to The New Yorker or in the cases of a few artists like Virgil Partch and Abner Dean, through a kind of hipster-geek reclamation process. Almost none of this book's major contributors are well remembered, at least not by more than three or for people in my circle of friends and acquaintances. Yet I'm sure they were higher up on the cartoon vocational food chain than many comic book artists that have made an impression on modern fans of that material.

It's only kind of halfway good collection; I don't get the sense that anyone is doing their absolutely best work for This Week, although with that circulation, I'm probably wrong (one would guess that the magazine we've all heard of we've heard of in part because they were better markets for the work) and we're just talking about a bunch of not-great cartoonists. There's a lot of quirky stuff of definite interest: a rare stateside Rowland Emett train drawing (it's even introduced with something like "here's the guy who draws the English trains"), a Bil Keane cartoon (attractive; mediocre joke), a pretty good Ronald Searle, multiple articles about the craft of cartooning written in the heightened whimsical tone so common to essay on lighter subjects in the '40s and '50s, and maybe best of all, little funny bios and pictures of the oft-repeating cartoonists, like Tom Henderson, Clyde Lamb and Harry Mace. If there's one cartoonist that pops out of the group it's Chon Day, if only because he has an extremely lean caption-writing style. You either bark out a laugh or you don't, there's never that delayed effect as the irony of the situation clicks in. My favorite is an older couple sitting at home reading, one a collared minister, who exclaims with a somewhat happy and satisfied look, "Wow! Am I going to ban this!"