In the text to the great new Complete Cartoons, the editors write:
In 1929, the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange was just a few subway stops away from The New Yorker‘s midtown offices, but when, in October, the crash came the magazine did its very best to ignore it…. Cartoonists were, on the whole, less interested in the contrasts between rich and poor than in the way the rich reacted to the crisis…
All right, then: Mistakes were made. After all, “I never told her about the Depression. She would have worried” is much funnier than grim union graphics. But is there really any call to keep printing cartoons like this week’s P.C. bum? When you live in the actual city of New York or similar urban places, actual bums are a pitiful sight, and the number of schticksters with signs and quick comebacks is pretty tiny compared with the legions of people so inert they might be dead, under cardboard. It’s been a while since I found these cartoons funny, I’m afraid.
On the other hand, the anthology is just about the best treat I’ve had in years (thanks, Dad!). It’s so big you feel small, like Alice, reading a book that will never end. It almost can’t, what with the two enclosed CDs that bring the cartoon total up to 68,647. Yum.
The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, ed. Robert Mankoff [Powell’s]