How-dy Bub Racist Lapel Pin Carnival and Sideshow Premium

A MILLION LAUGHS! It's New, It's Different, It's Terrific and It's Racist.

Ad for Carnival and Sideshow premium, 1950 Harris Novelty company

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Rude Novelty Gag Adult Bad Tasting Valentines

Ten cents worth of eleven novelty gag Valentines. One shown.

No date, no publisher Circa 1960 Collection Jim Linderman

On the Cusp of Extinction Roy Carling Captures the Family Farm in Comics and Cartoons

Roy Carling captured the family farm right on the cusp of extinction. Roy was born in 1918 and lived to 2009. I purchased some 100 of his original cartoon drawings recently at a flea market and am just getting around to reading them. Roy lived and worked in Howard City, Michigan.

Family farm. A term which evokes pleasant memories even if you never worked on one.

You won't see any gags by Roy about Listeria or E. coli outbreaks from somewhere affecting folks ten states over. There are no jokes about recalls or "lot numbers" to watch out for. Back when Roy was doing his farm gags, crops traveled to the market down the road, not across the country. Each cow had an affectionate name, and when she gave birth the calves got names too...(they sometimes even talked!) Property was bought and sold by the acre, not the million hectacres.

Monsanto, patent owner of the genetically modified seeds everyone has been forced into relying on today evokes no pleasant memories, nor do any of the other "agri-business" companies now holding us and our elected officials by the turnips.

In Roy's work you will see chickens strolling freely and stopping to peck at a feeder. You see they had beaks then, they weren't clipped off to prevent fights in the factory. Today, Roy's chickens would be known as "free-range" as if that is something strange.

You will see a farmer trying to figure out how to use his new combine, or getting his tractor repaired, or discussing the new "hired man". One man...who negotiates his monthly wage while the farm owner rolls in the dirt laughing.

Junior is asked to open his piggybank for the next tractor payment. A farmer marvels at his new "six-row" tools. The big day is when the "poultry buyer" drives up while the wife gathers eggs and junior receives his allowance. One farmer here brags that he has doubled his flock size from 40 to 80 birds.


Roy depicted the world he knew, and that world had neighbors loaning their barbwire stretcher to each other. The "milk tank" springs a leak and the barn cats have a feast. A local eccentric stacks his chicken cages in piles of four. FOUR. Have you seen a chicken factory of late? Chicken skyscrapers. In fact they don't WANT you to see them. Long buildings back from the road with no signs...just enormous fans to remove the smell and warnings from a distant conglomerate to keep away. I can remember an elementary school with a visit to a farm. Not anymore.

Roy didn't know he was capturing the death of the family farm. In his work you see the silos getting bigger, the owners worried about being bought out, the first experience with breeders and traveling seed salesmen and putting up a barn sign as it changes ownership. The hardworking family imagines a bright future with "atomic" powered tractors. The availability of "new crop varieties" gives the wife a chance to argue for a new hat. After all, if corn comes in varieties, why shouldn't her wardrobe?





Roy Carling numbered each cartoon and saved a few of the publications they appeared in. The newsletter of the Central Ohio Breeders Association runs Roy's gag with a farmer holding his hat out for donations while leaving the local IRS office. The New York Breeders Cooperative runs his "cow a minute" gag. Roy saved a letter from Land O Lakes asking for a turkey cartoon for the thanksgiving issue.

Farms are not funny anymore.

Original, hand-drawn gag cartoons by Roy Carling, circa 1960-1975 Collection Jim Linderman

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Vintage Art of the Tattoo Gag The Lost Art of the Tattoo Cartoon

(Like a third of the country, I am dealing with frozen formerly cumulus cloud...so here is a post from my other blog from a year ago, "The Lost Art of the Tattoo Gag")


You don't see too many tattoo gags anymore. At one time, the staple of the stapled joke digest, I guess the now all too familiar "tramp-stamp" on women's lower backs helped make the tattoo as a joke topic less funny somehow. I can also assure you if you DO laugh, you won't be seeing it for much longer. Either SHE will pull them up and leave in a huff, or HE will kick your ass.

I'm not quite sure the relationship between the tattoo artist and the cartoonist. Both are certainly adept at drawing babes...but did Sailor Jerry draw cartoons? (His "official" site now seems to be owned by a booze company, so instead you get a link to wiki with no pictures.) Of course tattoo decoration goes back to Caesar...but then busty women were drawn on the walls of caves. Now that I think of it, maybe those early erotic cave drawings were primitive flash and the dens actually parlors.

Tattoos of dames are closely related to the hot babe nose art painted on the cones of WW2 Bomber Planes and pinups drawn on duffel bags. Most platoons had a fellow who could draw hot ones, and they often did in trade for a few cigarettes. It is also a quite common subject category in postcard collecting...both actual photographs of them and goofy cartoon sailors.

Certainly the skill was, and is, interchangeable. Once you can draw a gal with gams, you can put it anywhere. A carny's arm, a sailor's chest or a biker's bicep in days gone by, or on the most friendly gentle person of either gender today, but for the life of me I can not think of a cartoonist who started as a body inker. Of course today there are hundreds of tattoo artists who create paintings and fine art as well.

The stigma is gone. So is the once common "joke" about getting drunk and waking with a decorated arm, the muscles which could be tensed to make a dame on your chest shimmy, and the ship design which "sinks" as a fellow ages.

If anyone out there needs a topic for a doctoral thesis, consider erotic body illustration and how it relates to girly pin-up gags of the 1950s and 1960s.

by Jim Linderman

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Vinyl LP Records Which Weren't There! Silent Records from In-Fidelity Joke Gag Disc Record

No one reads those digital "jokes" or "greeting cards" sent by email. At least I don't...if you want to thank someone, write them a letter and put a stamp on it.

I suspect Hallmark Card Stores will be closing around the same time as Barnes and Noble...some time around the middle of next year. Boom times for empty mall stores!

The "IN-FIDELITY" record label specialized in empty records! Record jackets with a blank vinyl disc inside imprinted with a hilarious gag inscribed on the disc!

"Bwah, Bwah" (sliding trombone "Nelson" like descending notes)

You can send an empty digital file too..."enclosed is a mp3 of my band in the garage...please have a listen when you can" and just forget to attach it.

Brochure advertising High "In-Fidelity" Albums circa 1960 Collection Jim Linderman

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