Life, 1920-11-04 · page 25 of 60
Life — November 4, 1920 — page 25: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**Top Cartoon:** A furniture salesman pitches an antique sideboard to customers, claiming it's 200 years old when it "looks it"—a joke about selling shabby goods as valuable antiques. **"In These Times" Article & Cartoon:** Humorist Robert C. Benchley satirizes overly complicated industrial packing methods. A craftsman boasts of crating furniture so elaborately that it cannot be unpacked without destroying it—absurd overkill presented as professional excellence. The piece mocks both modern manufacturing pretension and bureaucratic excess. Benchley even jokes about offering to crate escape artist Houdini inescapably. The sideline cartoon shows a man explaining to his friend that a locomotive accident dumped train parts on his car—a darkly comic illustration of the article's theme about destructive "solutions." Both items ridicule impractical over-engineering and sales hype disguised as craftsmanship, typical of Life's satirical approach to American business culture.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
IMAM, WE'LL GUARANTEE THIS SIDEBOARD TO BE TWO DRED YEARS OLD, “17 Looks 11.” places on the side of the tin, so that the person who is trying In These Times to wrench the ‘top’ to the right will tear little bits from his RIEND: ! Did you have any accident on your trip yesterday? finger. He is our most valuable workman, 3 , dal ‘ Mr. Orto Sreever: 1 think so. When I arrived home I “ Up stairs is where. ry this principle into crating. The Up stairs 1s where-we carry this principle into crating. found two locomotive wheels, some mail hags and part of a men there are able to crate furniture so that it is impossible to uncrate it without cutting off the legs or arms of the article itself. The boards of the crate are so intertwined with the protuberances on the piece of furniture that they cannot be lifted out of place without jamming the woodwork, and usually not even then. It is a secret process and was worked out for us by a trigonometrist of international repute. It would be impossible for an ordinary man to inclose a chair, for instance, dining car on my fender. in a crate of cight boards so that not one of the cight could be removed from its place without ruining the chair, and yet, thanks to our process, we are able to accomplish this for our customers, We have offered to crate Houdini in such a fas’ that he will be unable to extricate himself and remain physically intact, but he dares not take us up. “We had just perfected a method of inserting corks into bottles so that they could not be removed, when the govern- ment stepped in and crowded us out with the Eighteenth Amendment.” With these words the old craftsman broke down, and we had Grand Chorus: 1ooray! MERE COMES MISTER TURKEY, JUST to find our way out as best we could, Robert C. Benchley. IN TIME FOR THANKSGIVING DINNER comicbooks.com