Judge — June 3, 1916 — page 3: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a humorous sketch by Robert Ball depicting an early 20th-century scene on Riverside Drive in New York City. The cartoon shows a fashionable motorcar with well-dressed passengers beside an ornate cylindrical structure (likely a monument or pavilion) flanked by bare trees. The joke, revealed in the caption dialogue between "Dorothy" and "George," concerns battleships in the river. George explains they're positioned there "during the summer to drive the mosquitoes back"—an absurdist non-answer to Dorothy's question about their presence. The humor relies on the incongruity of using military vessels for pest control, satirizing either New York's mosquito problem or perhaps contemporary military concerns and their perceived irrelevance to urban life.