Judge, 1924-12-20 · page 26 of 36
Judge — December 20, 1924 — page 26: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous essay-cartoon mocking the false economy of the "2-pants suit"—a men's clothing marketing pitch popular in the early 20th century. Manufacturers claimed buying a suit with two pairs of trousers instead of one saved money. The unnamed narrator obsessively documents how this theory backfired spectacularly over 40 years. When the coat outlasted the first pair of pants, he had to buy another coat to match new trousers—creating an endless cycle. By calculating wear rates with absurd precision, he's discovered his 49th coat will wear out simultaneously with his 88th pants only if he lives over a hundred. A recent house fire destroyed this alignment, dooming him to perpetual imbalance. The satire targets both deceptive marketing and obsessive-compulsive consumer anxiety about waste and symmetry. The joke: attempting rational economy often produces irrational spending spirals.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
MERRY CHRISTMAS! CHRISTMAS EVE Moperx Mato—Hello! Police station? Well, I've trapped a burglar in my room who has been trying to pull the old Santa Claus gag on me. I'll keep him till you send up your bus. 2 Pants=1 Coat? Nouks always ask me why, for the past forty years, I have continu- ously worn the same suit of pepper and salt clothes; and I always reply to them: Beeause J abhor waste, despise loose ends, and suffer from am evenness complex—an_ all-obses- sive penchant for the leveling of hills and filling of valleys. The truth of the matter is that I have heen a victim of the 2-pants suit hypothesis, that illusory theory which economically equates 2 trousers with 1 coat. Economically! Ha-ha! Forty years ago to-day T bought my first 2-pants suit. But were my sartorial affairs evened up thereby? - | Minature SUID. fracelet, ancl Very pretty Xmas gift for milady. True, the coat did not survive the second pair of trousers, but that was the pity of it. My first « worn out, three more months of wear in the second pants, what was I to do Dut buy a second coat to match? And a third pair of trousers to give the brand-new jacket a run for its money? And yet, even after these extraor- dinary precautions, the second coat still had two and a half months of wear left in it when the third pair of pants had worn themselves unfit for publication; whereupon true cconomy demanded that I purchase a fourth pair of pepper and salt trousers and—to give the fourth trousers their proper wearing val a third pepper and salt coat, and a fifth pants to cateh up to the third coat, and a fourth coat to fully evaluate the fifth pants, But enough! You n these items, the desperate mill race. which T have been run ning. I had hoped, in this the fortieth year of my 2-pants experi- ment to equate matters; by careful mathematical calculation, Thi computed that on the eighth of the coming month, the knees of my eighty-eighth pepper and. salt pants would give way exactly at the moment that my elbows would break through the sleeves of my forty- ninth pepper and salt coat, Alas! Last night my house took fire, and while my forty-ninth was burned 1 imbecile fireman (curse him!) ued the eighty-eighth trou- sers, for which T must now buy the fiftieth coat, thus continuing the maddening 2-trouser cycle that I shall be unable to halt. unless I live to be over a hundred. However, there is hope yet. some day T shall have to dic some day T must be translate infinity where the parallel lines meet, and TL coat wears and wears out—with matl ical evenness as 2 pairs of pants! Cyril B. Egan “Hey, Santy Claus! You forgot to fill my stocking!” comicbooks.com