March 12, 2020 9
Foolish Questions
Art Spiegelman
SCREWBALL!:
The Cartoonists Who
Made the Funnies Funny
by Paul C. Tumey.
Library of American Comics,
303 pp., $59.
The Art of Rube Goldberg
an exhibition at the Museum of
Pop Culture, Seattle, February 11–
April 23, 2017; the Grand Rapids Art
Museum, May 21–August 27, 2017;
Citadelle Art Foundation and
Museum, Canadian, Texas, September
15–November 26, 2017; the
Contemporary Jewish Museum, San
Francisco, March 15–July 8, 2018; the
Portland Public Library, Portland,
Maine, August 3–September 22, 2018;
the National Museum of American
Jewish History, Philadelphia,
October 12, 2018–January 21, 2019;
the Evansville Museum of Arts,
History and Science, April 28–July 21,
2019; and the Queens Museum,
October 6, 2019–February 9, 2020
Two ladies on an outing to the Queens
Museum one weekend last fall wander
into “The Art of Rube Goldberg” exhi-
bition. They enter casually and chuckle
at a monitor playing a few moments
from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
A factory worker is immobilized in a
complicated lunch-feeding contraption
inspired by Rube Goldberg, a pal of
Chaplin’s. It shovels some soup into his
mouth, then short-circuits as it rams
a whirring cob of corn up against his
teeth, force-feeds him a couple of loose
bolts, shoves a slice of cream pie into
his dazed mug and then smears it with
an automated napkin. Next, there’s
a clip from a 1930 comedy, Soup to
Nuts, written by Goldberg. (It includes
a memorable antiburglar contraption
but today is better known for featur-
ing Larry, Moe, and Shemp before
they became the Three Stooges.) The
women glance at some of the original
art on the walls as they drift out and
one says, “Gosh, I never knew he was a
cartoonist, too!”
Being a cartoonist too was the price
of immortality for a cartoonist so fa-
mous that he became an adjective in
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as early
as 1931: “accomplishing by complex
means what seemingly could be done
simply.” The adjective still has cur-
rency, as in a recent Foreign Policy
opinion piece that describes the elec-
toral college as “that cockamamie
Rube Goldberg mechanism that never
quite worked as intended.” (It shows up
often in discussions of government pol-
icy and single-payer-health-care math.)
Rube Goldberg was the Christopher
Columbus of the screwball contrap-
tion, finding a way to get from point
A to point B by traveling through all
the other letters of the alphabet. And,
like Columbus, a number of other in-
trepid explorers had gotten there first.
At least two years before Goldberg,
the renowned British illustrator and
cartoonist Heath Robinson began pub-
lishing deadpan-droll tableaux that
featured useless inventions, as did Den-
mark’s hidden treasure, cartoonist and
humorist Storm Petersen. Both “Heath
Robinson” and “Storm P.” were adjec-
tivized in their own nation’s lexicons.
None of this has anything to do with
plagiarism; it’s a marker of the disori-
enting Machine Age these artists were
born into, and of cartooning’s singular
role as a Zeitgeist barometer.Goldberg was born on July 4, 1883,
to a Prussian-Jewish immigrant father
who became a fixture in San Fran-
cisco Republican politics. Fearful that
his son would become an artist, Max
Goldberg insisted that Rube study
to be an engineer at UC Berkeley. He
graduated in 1904 to a job mapping out
sewer mains for the city of San Fran-
cisco but bailed just four weeks laterto become a sports cartoonist for the
San Francisco Chronicle. Goldberg’s
engineering background allowed his
ingratiatingly lumpy cartoons to retain
the diagrammatic clarity both com-
ics and patent drawings demand. So
“Father Was Right”!—to quote one of
the many pre-Internet memes Gold-
berg generated in the more than sixty
series he drew in his lifetime. Others
include “No matter how thin you slice
it, it’s still baloney,” “Mike and Ike
they look alike!” (identical twins, one
Irish and one Jewish), and his first big
hit, “Foolish Questions,” from 1908
(as in Foolish Questions—No. 40,976 :
“Son, are you smoking that pipe
again?” “No, Dad,” says the son suck-
ing a pipe larger than his head, “this is
a portable kitchenette and I’m frying a
smelt for dinner”).
Goldberg is said to have produced
about 50,000 drawings in his lifetime,
and his inventions made up only a
small part of his vast and mixed-up
mix of features. He was himself a mas-
ter of reinvention: in his early days a
vaudeville performer, then an anima-
tor, song lyricist, radio personality,
short story and essay writer for popular
magazines, toastmaster, and star of his
own TV show. His last long goodbye
as a cartoonist was drawing political
cartoons from 1939 to 1964, before he
“retired” and became a sculptor until
his death at eighty-seven in 1970. His
editorial cartoons were drawn in the
style of Herblock, but with regrettable
anti–New Deal and occasional pro-
McCarthy stances (perhaps shaped
by Goldberg’s class interests—his car-
toons had made him wealthy, he was
married to the White Rose Tea heiress,
and apparently he had inherited his fa-
ther’s Republicanism; as I mentioned,
“Father Was Right”!).
The traveling retrospective at the
Queens Museum left out Goldberg’s
more embarrassing political cartoons,
and didn’t show even a tear-sheet ofhis powerful 1948 Pulitzer Prize–
winning emblem of cold war anxiety,
“Peace Today.” It depicts a suburban
American family lounging on the
lawn next to their two-story home,
sitting atop a giant A-bomb that tee-
ters over an abyss labeled “World
Destruction.”
The exhibition supplemented the
dozens of comic art originals on the
walls with full broadsheet-size Sun-
day comic pages, vitrines over-stuffed
with book covers, licensed games, post-
cards, buttons, and other ephemera, all
to show the artist as an observer of so-
cial foibles with an acute sense of the
absurd. The visitor was encouraged to
linger over Goldberg’s deft yet humble
grotesqueries and also to savor the
rhythms of his copious prose. Back in
the golden age of newspaper comics,
there used to be space and time for
written language.
The Art of Rube Goldberg, the
definitive coffee table book from 2013
that served as the catalyst for this ex-
hibit, provides over seven hundred
well- selected images and several valu-
able historical and biographical essays.
In the spirit of excess that the artist was
known for, it even comes with a paper-
engineered moving contraption oper-
ated by a pull-tab on its cover that will
make the book enticing to any child
near that coffee table. Whatever child-
hood pleasures Goldberg’s work may
offer, as Adam Gopnik points out in
his introduction,there seems, to adult eyes, to be
in [Goldberg’s] work some fatal,
almost unconscious, commentary
on the madness of science and the
insanity of modern invention....
He doubtless would have laughed,
or shaken his head in disbelief,
if asked how his work related to
Duchamp’s machine aesthetic,
or to Dada—and yet every mark
an artist makes takes place in aPanels from Count Screwloose of Tooloose by Milt Gross, April 5, 1931King^ Features^ Syndicate/TheLibraryof^ AmericanComics