PICTORIAL HUMOUR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 921, 5 April 1957, Page 11

PICTORIAL HUMOUR

Sir,-In comment on your highly interesting article about changes in pictorial humour, may I suggest that economy of line and caption may have these drawbacks, that jokes are less easily remembered, and the" body of humour is less valuable as a social picture? Judging as one who has used it as material scores of times, I should say Punch has been incomparable as a running social history of Britain, but that this value is now seriously threatened by the wire outline and the minimum of caption, At times the old Punch overdid both drawing and caption, but most of the jokes that became famous owed something to this generosity of treatment. Would "Bang went saxpence!" have become a household word without Keane’s wonderful drawing? Much of the humour of the curate’s egg joke lies in the elaborate picture of the Victorian bishop. and his family at breakfast. After the First War a young woman introduces her boy friend to her mother in the drawing-room, but has to ask him what his surname is. In this one joke there was a chapter of social change, but how could this have been properly represented by what Mr Mantalini called a "demd outline’? I find it hard to believe that the present fashion of stripped-to-the-bone humour is going to be remembered or cited, and this point is illustrated in your article. The old Punch picture of the two lovers on the park seat was adapted by Punch itself for a political cartoon-Eden and Eisenhower-last year. Those old drawings had breadth and depth. They were, as your article said, the product of a more leisurely age, but is leisure a bad thing? My difficulty with Punch now is ‘that there are so many jokes I can’t grasp. I have even seen one in The Listener. I may add a footnote to your mention of the New Yorker, It was the American Saturday Review, not an English paper, that said the New Yorker had "crossed the Atlantic and corrupted Punch." In an appreciative article on the New Yorker when Ross, its creator died, Professor Brogan, an éminent English interpreter of America, mentioned that Ross’s favourite comic journal was Punch.

ALAN

MULGAN

(Wellington)