Judge — February 26, 1927 — page 12: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Analysis This page contains two unrelated cartoons satirizing early 20th-century social anxieties. **Top cartoon**: Shows a train nearly colliding with automobiles. The humor plays on the "cow-catcher" (the angled guard on train fronts designed to push obstacles aside), suggesting cars are now invading railroad space—reflecting contemporary tensions between established rail transport and the new automobile industry. **Bottom cartoon**: A young man's grandparents arrive by car. His friend expresses shock that an elderly woman married at all, let alone to an older man. The satire targets class attitudes about age and romance among working-class or immigrant populations, where such unions apparently seemed ridiculous to Judge's middle-class readers. The casual dialect ("Wot?") suggests these are working-class characters, making the joke partly about social class assumptions regarding courtship norms.