Judge — February 23, 1929 — page 12: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# The Humphrey Brisket School for Barbers This is a humorous satire by "Dr. Theophrastus Seuss" (the pen name used by Dr. Seuss in Judge magazine) mocking a fictitious barber college. The cartoon depicts three scenes: **Top panel**: Professor Herpicide Smith teaches a class of students in barber chairs, with speech bubbles containing nonsensical barbering jargon—pure absurdist humor about vocational education. **Bottom left**: "The Novice Performs His First Shave" shows a trainee barber with a nervous customer, satirizing how difficult and dangerous amateur barbers are. **Bottom right**: "The College President," Dr. Humphrey Brisket, displays absurd trophies including Napoleon's hair and the "Empress Josephine's blond strand"—mocking how institutions inflate their prestige with dubious historical artifacts. The overall joke targets the pretension of trade schools and their claims of legitimacy through fake historical credibility. It's lighthearted satire of American educational vanity and the barber profession itself.