Life — September 9, 1920 — page 4: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "Obey That Impulse" — Life Magazine Satire This page satirizes Life magazine's own subscription drive. The cherub with a megaphone represents the magazine's relentless marketing campaign urging readers to subscribe. The text humorously acknowledges that Life has been aggressively promoting subscriptions ("that uncontrollable desire to ask people to subscribe"), admitting their tactics are manipulative—they've repeated the pitch so often that readers begin believing it themselves. The satire is self-directed: Life openly confesses to employing "sinisters purpose" flattery while pretending their circulation competition is legitimate. The "Special Offer" section below converts the satire into an actual subscription pitch—the joke being that even while mocking their own hard-sell tactics, they immediately deploy them anyway. It's meta-advertising: selling subscriptions by ironically admitting how aggressively they sell subscriptions.