10 The New York Review
moment of time, and within a com-
mon frame of meaning.^1Duchamp and Man Ray embraced
Goldberg as a fellow Dada traveler by
putting one of his cartoons in their 1921
issue of New York Dada, but the feel-
ing wasn’t exactly mutual. Like many
American cartoonists of his day, Gold-
berg was dismissive of nonobjective
art. As Peter Marzio, his biographer,
wrote in 1973, “Rube believed that
fine art was good only if it won public
acceptance. Sales were Rube’s test of
beauty.”^2 Still, the cartoonist’s inven-
tions showed up in MoMA’s landmark
1936 exhibit, “Fantastic Art, Dada and
Surrealism,” and were also part of its
1968 show “The Machine As Seen at
the End of the Mechanical Age.”
In 1970, two weeks before his death,
a full retrospective of his work, entitled
“Do It the Hard Way: Rube Goldberg
and Modern Times,” was unveiled at
the Smithsonian Institution. The show,
according to Marzio, who cocurated the
exhibition, was something of a block-
buster, with over two thousand guests
attending the opening. Goldberg’s car-
toons were also something of a “block
buster” in the sense of opening up the
redlined ghetto of “low” art, welcom-
ing it into the hallowed precincts of
High Culture. They were among the
earliest examples of comic art ever to
be displayed on art museum walls.
Over on the comics side of the col-
lapsing high-low divide, Goldberg’s
influence can be found in the work of
generations of influential cartoonists,
including Dr. Seuss, Harvey Kurtz-
man, and Robert Crumb—all of whom
have now been exhibited in museums.
In fact, with categories of every kind
crumbling around us daily, seeing
comic art on walls has become delight-
fully commonplace, though the cel-
ebration of Goldberg’s pioneering art
in Queens was met with smaller crowds
than he deserves. (The museum orga-
nizers tried to entice its audience, even
having a well-intended if less-than-
successful “Machine for Introducing
an Exhibition” built to stand in front of
the wall into the first gallery. The press
of a button sets off a chain reaction in-
volving an electric fan, a windmill, a
die-cut Rube Goldberg drawing of a
boot, a watering can, and three sepa-
rate c omputer s c re en s , each w it h si mple
animations of animals in a process that
eventually unfurls a welcome banner.
Mixing analog and digital technologies
could have provoked thoughts about
what the creator of useless complexity
might have thought about life in our
age of sleek electronics, but the whole
device—barely a gizmo, let alone a
contraption—looked minimalist and
wan rather than deliriously tangible
and maximalist, like the artist it was
meant to introduce. The Saturday I vis-
ited, I pressed the green start button,
and nothing happened. Then I noticed
a sign on a stand nearby: “This work is
temporarily out of order. We apologize
for the inconvenience.”)
Foolish Question # 25,743,000 :
“So are you somehow trying to saythat Rube Goldberg was a serious
Fine Artist???”
“No, you Boob! I’m pointing out
to the uninitiated that Rube Gold-
berg was a fine Screwball Artist!”Now that comics have put on long
pants and started to strut around with the
grownups by calling themselves graphic
novels, it’s important to remember that
comics have their roots in subversive joy
and nonsense. For the first time in the
history of the form, comics are begin-
ning to have a history. Attractively de-
signed collections of Little Nemo, Krazy
Kat, Thimble Theater, Barnaby, Pogo,
Peanuts, and so many more—all with
intelligent historical appreciations—
are finding their way into libraries.
Paul Tumey, the comics
historian who co-edited The
Art of Rube Goldberg book
seven years ago, has recently
put together a fascinating
and eccentric addition to
the expanding shelves of
comics history.^3 The future
of comics is in the past, and
Tumey does a heroic job
of casting a fresh light on
the hidden corners of that
past in SCREWBALL!: The
Cartoonists Who Made the
Funnies Funny. It’s a lav-
ish picture book with over
six hundred comics, draw-
ings, and photos, many of
which haven’t been seen
since their twenty-four-
hour life-spans in newspa-
pers around a century ago.
The book is a collection
of well-researched short biographies
of fifteen artists from the first half of
the twentieth century, accompanied
by generous helpings of their idiosyn-
cratic cartoons. Goldberg—whose name
schoolchildren learn when their STEM
studies bump into chain reactions—is
the perfect front man to beckon you
toward the other less celebrated news-
paper cartoonists who worked in the
screwball vein that Tumey explores.
Screwball is an elusive attitude in
the language of laughs and, like por-
nography, it’s hard to define but easy to
recognize. Tumey prowls for common
denominators and trails of influence
that connect these odd ducks and their
droppings. But the closer one looks,
the less they seem to have in common.
Virtually all the earliest newspaper
comics were designed to be funny, but
not all the funnies were screwball. The
book is a survey, not in the sense of a
Comics 101 history course serving up
a knowledgeable overview, but more
like a deep exploratory mining dig
that samples underground specimens
to assay what’s of value. The project is
hardly arbitrary, but it doesn’t seem ex-
actly definitive, either. It’s actually sort
of, well, screwy—and it may just be that
screwball is its own shortest definition.
One foot of the slippery screwball
stretches back through vaudeville to
commedia dell’arte with its stock situ-
ations and characters; the other footstrides forward toward Dada, surreal-
ism, and the theater of the absurd—
while the third foot of this ungainly
creature remains firmly balanced on
a banana peel. Screwball comics tend
toward the manic, excessive, over-the-
top, obsessive, irrational, anarchic,
and grotesque; they can veer toward
parody or satire, but at their core they
are an assault on reason and its puny
limitations. They wage a gleeful war on
civilization and its discontents—armed
mostly with water-pistols, stink bombs,
and laughing gas.The cinematic analogs of screwball
comics would include the Marx Broth-
ers’ Duck Soup, Olsen and Johnson’s
Hellzapoppin, as well as the early ani-
mated shorts of the Fleischer brothers,Tex Avery, et al. Screwball comics have
little to do with the more attended- to
genre of romantic “screwball com-
edy”—movies like Howard Hawks’s
Bringing Up Baby or Frank Capra’s It
Happened One Night—except in their
velocity. Screwball strips, designed for
family newspapers, had even fewer
hints of sex than those screwball ro-
mantic comedies, though their punch-
lines did elicit sublimated climaxes
with the so-called straight man flying
out of the last box, feet in the air.
In Smokey Stover, Bill Holman’s
essence- of-screwball fireman strip,
rapid-fire puns rage through all the pan-
els like kindling for a four-alarm news-
print conflagration. “Plop-take” feet
sail out of their shoes, revealing toes
that poke through sock holes; bowties
pop off shirt collars while mustaches,
hairpieces, eyeglasses, false teeth, and
even ears explode clear off of heads.
Another symptom of this approach—
rechanneled id erupting in the release
of a belly laugh—is what Tumey dubs
“the screwball spin,” a blurry mandala
of repeating heads and limbs that form
a proto-Futurist pinwheel of frenzied
slapstick action. It was, for example,
how Elzie Segar drew Popeye pum-
meling an adversary in the ring—like a
rapidly rotating phénakistiscope.
I can only tour you through a few of
the giant screwballs spinning around
in this treasure chest of salvaged news-
print, and will start as the book does,
with Frederick Burr Opper. A found-
ing father of the funnies, he’s credited
with making speech balloons a regular
part of the comics’ formal vocabulary.
He was already a seasoned and highly
regarded artist of forty-one by the time
he was recruited by William RandolphHearst’s Journal in 1899 as a big gun
in the epic newspaper war between
Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
Pulitzer had developed a high-speed
four-color newspaper press, hoping to
bring the great art of the ages to his
masses. When he found that the impre-
cise, out-of-register printing made the
Old Masters look like blurry Impression-
ists, he settled on a comics supplement
with black outlines containing flat colors.
The funnies became a major weapon
in the battle for circulation—and Hearst
soon set up his own color supplement, an-
nouncing it as “eight pages of iridescent
polychromous effulgence that makes
the rainbow look like a lead pipe!”
Opper, a formidable draftsman,
had become a star in Puck, the color-
lithographed, Progressive Era satirical
weekly. Instead of bringing gravitas to
Hearst’s paper, Opper re-
made himself as a king of
comedy, working in a play-
ful, casual mode. His first
and longest-lived hit, Happy
Hooligan, featured a hap-
less hobo with a tin can for
a hat; his well-meaning but
dimwitted attempts to be
helpful brought swirls of
multipanel havoc that often
ended with a screwball spin
of cops brandishing night-
sticks and dragging our hero
off to the slammer. He was
a precursor of Chaplin’s
tramp, Goldberg’s long-lived
Boob McNutt, and, a half
century later, another beau-
tiful loser named Charlie
Brown. Happy Hooligan is
a genial version of the xeno-
phobic caricatures of simian-
featured Irish immigrants that Thomas
Nast had angrily drawn for Harper’s
Weekly and that Opper, following in
Nast’s footsteps, had produced for Puck.
Ah, stereotypes! Cartoons are a vi-
sual language of simplification and
exaggeration whose vocabulary was
entirely premised on them. It’s as if
the N-word was the only word in the
dictionary to describe people of color,
and even the poetry that comics can
offer had to be written in this debased
language. We humans are hard-wired
toward stereotyping, and, alas, comics
echo the way we think. It’s part of the
medium’s danger and its power. Tu-
mey’s collection of historical material
comes with a trigger warning:These comic strips were created
in an earlier time and may include
racial and other stereotypes; we re-
produce them in historical context
with the understanding that they
reflect a thankfully bygone era.He scrupulously tries to depict the work
of the era accurately without grinding our
eyeballs into an overdose of toxic images.
Still, it’s hard to guide an uninitiated
reader to distinguish between intentional
insults and images that—considering the
form and our nation’s history—are only
ambiently offensive, reflecting the time
in which they were made.
Which brings us to Eugene “Zim”
Zimmerman, who was one of Amer-
ica’s most famous cartoonists at the
turn of the twentieth century. A con-
summate graphic artist, Zim had an
unfortunate predilection for the ethnic
and racial themes that were especially
popular at the time, and—though this
material may represent only, say, 30A 1995 US postage stamp adapted from artwork by Rube Goldberg
in Collier’s, September 26, 1931©2020Heirs^ of^ Rube^ Goldberg(^1) Jennifer George, The Art of Rube
Goldberg: (A) Inventive (B) Cartoon
(C) Genius (Harry N. Abrams), p. 16.
(^2) Peter C. Marzio, Rube Goldberg: His
Life and Work (Harper and Row), p. 305.
(^3) Full disclosure: the tribe of obsessive
c om ic s s c hol a r s i nt ere st e d i n t h i s s or t of
thing is a small one. Tumey and I became
friends through a screwball blog that
he started in 2012 to contemplate the
subject. See screwballcomics.blogspot
.com.