William Cole, ed. The Punch Line (1968) A collection Punch cartoons from the 1960s. Funny, wry, satirical, humorous, allusive, straightforward, in short whatever your desire in a cartoon, you’ll find some here. The book shows off twenty-five Punch regulars, many of whom also drew for The New Yorker. Cartoons are and odd kind of art: they rely on cultural knowledge, sometimes esoteric. Much of their meaning is contained in the bits and bobs included in the drawing, and even in the shapes of the lines used to mark the expression on a face or the attitude of a body. Words point the point of the drawing, but often aren’t needed. Stereotypes abound: gardeners wear shabby pants well past their best before dates. Racy women have almond eyes and lush lips. Snooty people look down their noses. Husbands often cringe. And so on. In fact, cartoons remind us that stereotypes are used to signal status, character, personality, life-style, and so on. They often don’t work as intended, or even do harm, because they simplify, and because they change more slowly than the culture that made appropriate sense of them in the past. In their use of cultural signals cartoons resemble Medieval and Renaissance pictures, which were made for people who could read the symbols included in the image. How much contemporary cultural knowledge do we need to understand the art of our own time? I’d say, a lot. We don’t realise how much until we see the art of a generation or two past. Art marks generational change as much as fashion does, but fashion lags, and usually has to catch up to art. I liked all the cartoons in this book, but some more than others. Here’s one of my favourites. The caption reads "Come back - I haven't finished with you yet! "
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