Life — July 29, 1920 — page 21: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a domestic humor cartoon satirizing romantic male pretension. A poet sits gazing at the sea, waxing poetic about listening to its "voice" for endless hours. His wife punctures this sentimentality with sharp practicality: she's saying he'd never devote that kind of attention and time to *her*, despite marriage vows implying he should value her company above nature's abstractions. The joke relies on the period's common stereotype of husbands neglecting their wives' emotional needs while romanticizing external pursuits. The wife's direct, unglamorous dialect contrasts with the poet's flowery language, emphasizing the gap between male idealism and female pragmatism in marriage. It's gently mocking male self-absorption disguised as artistic sensitivity.