Thurber Thursday: Two Cartoonists Walk Into A Bar…

From time-to-time I revisit Harrison Kinney’s massive James Thurber: His Life And Times. I usually (always?) find something I missed on previous readings. The other day I came across this on page 578:

“Besides Talk rewrite, he [Thurber] produced two original Talk pieces and a Comment, and thought up the caption for another artist’s cartoon showing a barroom filled with women drinkers, the bartender yelling at the one male customer: “Take your hat off! Try and remember where you are, will you.”

Mr. Kinney did not identify the cartoonist who was gifted the Thurber caption, nor did he provide the date the cartoon was published in The New Yorker. Naturally, this little mystery sent me to the magazine’s now 20 year old database (and a wonderful database it is. Nothing since matches it).

Entering the key words “Take your hat off” I was given a handful of possibilities, but only one was an exact match. The drawing was done by W.C. Galbraith (coincidently just mentioned on the Spill last week). It was published, full page, in the issue of March 2, 1935.

What’s really interesting to me is the thousand mile gap between Thurber’s style and Galbraith’s. Galbraith’s drawings were, obviously (!), not Thurber-like. They were more Reginald Marsh meets Perry Barlow meets Carl Rose. Everything about the drawing is opposite of what I imagine Thurber’s version would’ve looked like. His figures would would not have been in a stew of wash, and deep greys, and the room would have been, at best, more in what’s called (or used to be called) cabinet perspective. There would’e been a lot of white space, and the people’s expressions would’ve, I’m almost positive, been more distinct. This is not a critique of Galbraith’s drawing (I think the one above is a beauty)– it’s just a thumbnail exploration of one artist’s world imagined side-by-side with another. Since we don’t have Thurber’s version to examine, I’ll just have to be satisfied with my idea of what his idea for the drawing would look like. It’s helpful to have Thurber barroom examples to guide our imagination, such as this classic, “For the last time — you and your horsie get away from me and stay away!” — originally published in The New Yorker, May 28, 1932.

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James Thurber Born, Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894. Died 1961, New York City. New Yorker work: 1927 -1961, with several pieces run posthumously. According to the New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn, “In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors — E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them — did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured.”

Key cartoon collection: The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper & Bros., 1932). Key anthology (writings & drawings): The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Row, 1945). There have been a number of Thurber biographies. Burton Bernstein’s Thurber (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Henry Holt & Co., 1995) are essential. Website

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W.C. Galbraith Born, January 21, 1894, Salt Lake City, Utah. Died, September 13, 1978. New Yorker work: 1929 – 1940; 151 drawings and 7 covers.