The New Yorker Cartoon Album 1975-1985

Cartoons are a combination of sight gag and brief caption that either emphasizes or contradicts the visual. The cartoons that appear in "The New Yorker" excel in both areas. Most in this collection are satirical in nature, poking good, clean fun at some of our most cherished institutions. To understand some of them, it is necessary to either understand current political or social events, but for most of them, no additional knowledge is required. For example, there is the cartoon of military men around a table with maps of the world and the speaker says, "Gentlemen, being a superpower is no longer enough. We must become a super-duper power." Funny enough by itself, but in the context of the nuclear arms race, the satire is hysterical. My favorite is the one where two snakes, one larger than the other meet. The smaller says to the larger, "Not THE Monty Python." On occasion, you must know something about literature to make sense of the cartoon. For example, there is the king finding a nail on the floor and then further down the hall, there is a horseshoe. There is also one where two men named Wilhelm and Jacob are arguing about the plot details of a story about a child walking through the woods. I really enjoyed this book, going through all the cartoons in one sitting. Sometimes I laughed, a few times I groaned, but in all cases I smiled.