Judge — December 5, 1891 — page 33: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a sequential comic strip showing two monkeys mimicking human behavior and games. The monkeys progressively imitate humans playing parlor games—beginning with "Let's you and me play that game" and proceeding through various activities like card games ("All right. Are you ready?"), counting games, and acrobatic stunts, culminating in chaos and destruction. The final panel's caption—"Well, losing may be the correct thing, but we fail to see the fun of it"—reveals the satirical point: the monkeys can imitate human *forms* of behavior but miss the underlying *purpose* or enjoyment. The strip appears to mock either human pretension (showing how arbitrary social games are) or to satirize those who blindly imitate fashionable behaviors without understanding their meaning—a common theme in Gilded Age satire about social climbing and cultural mimicry.