As I was saying on Friday, I was investigating a whole nother subject when I fell down that doggone rabbit hole. (I’m a little behind the ties here: is there a new term to describe what happens when the Interwebs take you downstream from where you wanted to go? Are you rabbitholing? Have you been rabbitholed? I would hate to use a word incorrectly, especially that last one.)
Anyway, what I started out to study was what I call the Grade School Valentine school of comic postcard, something that seems to have been especially prevalent in the 1940s. You remember those grade school Valentines, which gave us our first exposure to mass puns: a picture of a cat holding a heart saying “I’m Not KITTEN Around, Valentine!” or a horse holding a heart and saying “Don’t Want To NAG, But Will You Be My Valentine?”
When you weren’t considering a class action lawsuit against the publishers for exposing children to something as dangerous as the Obvious Pun, you may have wondered what the people who created these works of art did the rest of the year. Surely, they couldn’t spend an entire year just thinking of new ways to have a puppy holding a heart say ‘DOG-DGONE It, You’d Be a Great Valentine!”
Wonder no more. The era of, oh, 1936 to 1955 seemed to have an inexhaustible appetite for postcards with the same sort of animal humor. You saw a little of that last Friday, with cartoonists working new excuses for a picture of a dog and the oxymoron “Doggone”. (How could you say Dog Gone when the Dog was right there and hadn’t gone anyplace?)
The larger format offered more space to play with the picture, and the fact that THESE cards were for expressing friendship to an older audience meant the artist could indulge in more than one pun in the same picture. Note that here we are observing the dual meaning of “track” while also playing with “bears” and “bear’s.”
Artists could also toy with more adult themes. This gag has no particular relevance to most second graders.
And the rolling PIN idea was more for grown-up sitcoms.
Maybe the postcards were outlets for jokes that came up while the artist was working on the more restrictive and demanding Valentine art form. Did the opposite ever happen? It would take a lot more research (and probably endless storage space for the Valentines and postcards) but did the artists sometimes apply the same joke to both, knowing two separate audiences might like the same gag and never realize the joke was available in both markets?
What a rich field for research! The harvest might be a Ph.D. and a chance to fertilize new areas of previously uncultivated….
You see the dangers, though. Too many of these multi-pun cards (can you find THREE in this picture?) and you start talking that way without realizing you’ve crossed a fence into…no, let’s stop here and get back to considering that class action lawsuit. We all see what comes of milking these gags until….
Blogsy Babbles 