If laughter’s the best medicine, doodle me a draught of health – Only Joking! – Cartoon Museum
Laughter is the best medicine, they say: and here is a tonic for the dark days of economic troubles and wintry months of dark afternoons and icy weather.
Over 90 cartoons that will tickle you rotten have taken centre stage at Bloomsbury’s Cartoon Museum as the institute offers an antidote to the miseries of January and February.
Drawn from the museums extensive collection, the show covers topics such as love, life, sickness and death to art, literature, the weather and our battles with technology.
Curator Anita O’Brien said: “Trying to make people laugh is a thankless task and joke cartoons are perhaps one of the most unappreciated areas of comic art.
“When a cartoon works it seems so obvious, so effortless, that the skill required to create it becomes invisible.”
Works on display include those from the golden age of cartoons: from the 1920s to the 1940s there were many magazines that published comic ditties. Everyone knows Punch for its witty drawings, but there was a massive market for a daily doodle based on what was going on.
Publications like Blighty, The Bystander, The Tatler and Passing Show all ran cartoons, as did the national and local papers. What they all had in common was they commented on topical issues – and made people laugh.
DAN CARRIER
• Only Joking!
Cartoon Museum. 35 Little Russell Street, WC1A. 020 7580 8155