Judge — August 20, 1927 — page 22: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This single-panel cartoon mocks femininity in tennis through a visual joke. Two men play tennis while a woman has fainted in the foreground—the punchline being that tennis is supposedly "a sissy's game," yet a woman's delicate constitution can't handle even watching it. The accompanying text is unrelated banter about horse racing (mentioning "Laddie-Boy Perelman" at Lincoln Fields) and a hobo joke, suggesting this page mixed sports commentary with humor. The satire targets two things: the emasculation anxiety around tennis as an "unmanly" sport, and the stereotype of women as fragile and prone to swooning. By depicting women as too weak even to observe tennis, the cartoon absurdly defends the sport's masculinity while simultaneously mocking Victorian-era female delicacy tropes.