We have been going through my inventory looking at birds which are not storks or chickens, which seem to be out most popular postcard avians. We have covered such obvious choices as vultures and ostriches, and looked briefly into the postcard lives of pelicans, ducks, and geese. For reasons not known to me, I have found no cartoon woodpeckers in my files (sorry, Woody) while flamingos, a postcard staple, are valued manly for their decorative qualities, and almost never appear in cartoon postcards.
Songbirds are fairly generic. They seem to appear on postcards to do two things, one of which is singing.
This is a bit of folk wisdom passed along the generations. We have examined elsewhen the sparrows which watch behind the once omnipresent horse, looking for undigested seeds in horse droppings. (Interesting how our ancestors, whom we accuse of being too prudish for everyday life, were interested in bathroom functions out in the wild.
Though there were some cartoonists who found the other function of songbirds to be just as annoying. (Rather like humor immortal Will Cuppy, who preferred to sleep during the daylight hours and felt songbirds particularly were out to get him.)
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, we have the owl, who had three basic purposes on postcards. As mentioned here and there, I have virtually no Halloween postcards. On Halloween, an owl’s function was closest to its role in real life and folklore: terrifying apex predator. But the rest of the year, it weas usually a symbol of wisdom (a result of its large eyes and tendency to stand there watching you with apparent disapproval. The ancient Greeks made the owl a sidekick of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, essentially for its face alone.
Wisdom not being all that useful in comedy, however, its OTHER job was to say “Who?”
We mentioned a few weeks ago an era of postcard cartooning which seemed to derive its aesthetic from grade school Valentines. Well, “whooooo” fit in just as well on postcards. This was especially useful when combined with some sort of pursuit of learning, as can be seen from these two cards reminding you that you missed Sunday School last week.
Although it did have other applications.
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