GREAT CARTOONS OF THE WORLD SERIES 9/2

Here's part two continuing from last week reprinting cartoons from the 1975 called Great Cartoons of the World, Series 9

Charles Addams for The New Yorker William O'Brian Jerszy Flisak for Szpilki Jules Stauber John Glashan Vlasta Zábranský for Dikobraz Lee Lorenz, again in The New Yorker. Whitney Darrow, Jr. in The New Yorker Eldon Dedini Stanislav Holý for Dikobraz Jean-Jacques Sempé for Denoël George Price for The New Yorker Miroslav Barták in Dikobraz Ton Smits More from editor John Bailey's introduction:

A famous vaudeville comedian used to come out on the stage while it was in total darkness and shout angrily at the top of his voice for lights. When he got lights he was seen to be carrying a bicycle pump. He never played the bicycle pump, but the audience was disarmed and laughed easily.

Besides removing resistance to laughter the cartoonist must create something for the reader to laugh at. Freud generally attributes laughter to “an economy of psychic expenditure”, by which he means that when someone tells you that Queen Elizabeth was a virgin, you get ready to expend a lot of psychic energy so that you will be able to understand what he is talking about. When he finishes by saying “from the waist up”, you discover that you don't need that psychic energy you have stored up like a deep breath, so you release only a little of it. Naturally, a man whose code of behavior does not permit him to be seen in his bathrobe would release more.

All sophisticated people have some skill at nonsense and satire. The cartoonist has a certain irreverence bubbling in him at all time, and a perceptive eye for the humorous aspect of any situation. The Human Clod, whether intellectual or middlebrow, takes the six o'clock news as literal fact. And assumes that the utility company has arrived in some logical way at a charge of twelve dollars and forty-three cents per ohm. The cartoonist sees the lie, and the ludicrous extreme to which it can be carried. The Clod cannot do this. He must go on his leaden way to live and get his humor canned. He must put on his tuxedoand pay eighteen-fifty to have this thing done for him, exactly as he might have a colonic irrigation done.