Judge, 1922-01-14 · page 4 of 36
Judge — January 14, 1922 — page 4: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Analysis of "A Southern Exposure" This satirical cartoon by Emmett Watson depicts a street scene with two uniformed officers discovering a dead body. The title and accompanying jokes satirize Southern racial violence and censorship of film content. The dialogue snippets mock: 1. **Film censorship**: Studios claiming to remove "immoral" content while ignoring depictions of lynching 2. **Southern violence**: The dead body represents victims of racial terror, presented as something routine to "expose" 3. **Hypocrisy**: The contrast between censoring bedroom scenes versus tolerating "Southern" (racial) violence The cartoon critiques how American institutions—both entertainment and law enforcement—tolerated or obscured racial murders while policing other "moral" content. The dead body is the dark joke: what reformers truly overlook.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
POOR FISH “How do you feel about reforming the movies?” “Most of the pictures I’ve seen are more to be pitied than censored.” VISIBLE EVIDENCE “Is he a man of good breeding?” “Well, I know he took five firsts at the poultry show.” A SOUTHERN. EXPOSURE THE WAY THEY WORK “Have you any alarm clocks?” in- quired the customer. ”What I want is one that will arouse the girl without waking the whole family.” “I don’t know of any such alarm clock as that, madam,” said the man behind the counter. “We keep just the ordi- nary kind that will wake the whole fam- ily without disturbing the girl.” 2 WEARINESS “People are growing tired of the boudoir scenes in modern comed: “Yes, bedroom spells boredom.” UNSPECIFIED “I am strongly in favor of the United States taking China’s part.” “So am I; but the question is, which part?”