This "What is an Optimist?" schtick was a big thing at one time, but it's hard to know whether it was passe by 1930.I bring this up because throughout its first year of publication the fledgling New Yorker magazine peppered its pages with the same joke, over and over again:
Pa, what's an optimist?Sometimes, for variety, they'd reverse it.
A man who thinks he can do it in par.*
A man who thinks he can do it in par.This was obviously some New Yorker editor's 1925 idea of a joke, and the repetition was also supposed to be funny, but...well, I hereby admit that I didn't get it. Eventually it seemed like something they were doing just to fill the occasional half-inch of blank column.
Pa, what's an optimist?
* (I'm paraphrasing a bit because I haven't read those issues in several years, but the joke appeared so often that I think it's permanently engraved in my mind).
2 comments:
Looks like illustrations I've seen in old Alice In Wonderland volumes.
I don't know about the "optimist" joke, but these two outrageous-looking "insects" seem British - they could be members of a gentleman's club, where they puff on cigars whilst reading the papers or discussing politics.
Maybe its their 19th century-looking "moustaches"?
What was good 'ol Dr. Seuss smoking when he conceived this ad?
Whatever it was, I suspect he smoked it right up to the end of his life!
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