So, in considering the role played in postcard cartoons by people who wear glasses, we have found them to be largely slow-moving, slow-thinking characters whose job it is, in the main, to be stunned by the punchline. Look at this English example. He clearly is not one of the folks who work at the company: he’s too well dressed for a working class job. He has visited the lower orders solely for the purpose of being taken aback by the gag.
Glasses are for the goofy, and the unattractive.
The wearing of spectacles are not only unflattering, but are a sign that the person wearing them is short-sighted. Is this because our ancestors didn’t get their lenses upgraded as often as we do? Come on, if we’re wearing our glasses, we probably see better than those of you who refuse to put ‘em on, right?
This fellow doesn’t count. The sun was in his eyes. (Someday, perhaps, we shall throw caution to the wind and cover the running postcard gag about men with glasses, or who left their glasses home, or whose sunglasses are too dark, who grab what they think are beachballs at the beach. We shall classify these by what the poor dub grabbed and how badly damaged he is afterward, and it will no doubt be a great benefit to students of humor for years to come, resulting in a Nobel Prize for the originator of the Optical Intrusion Index, whereafter I shall apply the prize money to providing postcard guidance in a string of beachfront…where were we?)
In any case, it was just a quick bit of comic shorthand. People with glasses were a bit slow, and didn’t see what was right in front of their eyes.
Unless they were quick and couldn’t see it.
With one notable exception. See, that hunter and this gentleman were the work of Curteich cartoonist Ray Walters, whose work brightened the world of comic postcards at mid-century. And his outdoorsmen, hearty souls enjoying themselves (and often delivering the punchline of the joke) notably wore great big spectacles.
There have been plenty of articles and even a book studying the career f Mr. Walters, but I haven’t gotten hold of any of these yet. So I cannot say for sure whether he himself wore glasses. I don’t even know for sure if he was a fisherman, though the sheer exuberance of all his fishing postcards shows an understanding of the sport.
But I think there’s another possible explanation for these rugged outdoorsmen, defying the weather, the fish, and the expectation that people with glasses never have any fun.
This picture almost but not quite becomes a presidential portrait. See, one of the most famous outdoorsmen of the age when Ray Walters was a youngster was Theodore Roosevelt, a proponent of the rugged outdoor life, the big stick, and the general roar of exuberance in life and politics. And HE would have been lost without his glasses. Perhaps he explains why Ray Walters’s fishermen and hunters are so often bespectacled and grinning with the joy of life. (Roosevelt was possibly the grinningest of twentieth century presidents, even including Jimmy Carter. In fact, he was also one of the few, aside from Harry Truman, say, who wore glasses on the campaign trail. The image problem of us spectacled bipeds isn’t just the postcard artists, I guess.)
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