The Fabuleous Fifties: Another-Week-of-Laffs

Saturday, November 08, 2025

Another-Week-of-Laffs

Saturday Laff Day. Continuing into a second week, here are my samples of the second King Features daily panel series (after This Funny Day), with many of the big middle tier names of the cartoon world of the late forties and early fifties.

2 comments:

Smurfswacker said...: As an American kid growing up in the 1950s I saw countless of these cartoons. They were in the newspaper, in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, everywhere. As a kid most of them left me cold. The majority seemed to be about married couples who hated--or at least despised--each other. Snide husbands belittled their wives both to their faces and behind their backs, imperious wives made sarcastic cracks about their husbands to the other "girls" over coffee. Depending upon the gag, women were vain, dictatorial, wasteful and stupid; men were arrogant, drunken, henpecked, and also stupid. The typical cartoon marriage was basically two people who detested each other barely tolerating their spouses in between noisy fights and bursts of violence.

My own parents had a long, happy marriage. They seldom fought. When they did it frightened me. Perhaps that's why I reacted to "battle of the sexes" cartoons with uneasiness. They never raised a smile, much less a laugh. Seeing them again decades later I find them rather sad. So many unhappy people!; 2:31 PM
Ger Apeldoorn said...: Humor in those days very often was a form of passive agression. When it is done well, it can give some sort of polite comment on what society finds normal but the cartoonist doesn't, He invites you to laugh it it. These days, we tend not to tolerate wrongs as much. Leaving less cause for this type of humor. It's probably a good thing.; 11:00 AM

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