Judge — September 21, 1901 — page 16: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

These two cartoon strips use Irish-American stereotypes common to early 20th-century humor. **Top panel ("Looking Forward"):** Two working-class men (likely Irish, given names Clancy and Corrigan) joke about a barroom fight. The humor concerns black eyes—one saved his friend from getting both eyes blackened so he'd look presentable at a wake (funeral gathering). **Bottom panel ("Bound to Die"):** Western characters discuss a lovestruck man whose romantic rejection has made him suicidal. His "suicide options" are comically trivial: stealing a horse or taking up cigarette smoking—both presented as fatal vices. The joke plays on exaggerated masculine despair. Both strips employ ethnic caricature and working-class dialect humor typical of Judge's satirical approach. The comedy relies on period-specific assumptions: that wakes were social occasions where appearance mattered, and that cigarettes were dangerously disreputable.