Life, 1922-01-12 · page 12 of 34
Life — January 12, 1922 — page 12: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This six-panel cartoon mocks the Fairlamb couple's attempts at dieting and exercise. The narrative follows their increasingly desperate efforts: they discover spots on their lamb (a pun on their surname) are gone, join a gym, carry pedometers to prevent cheating, attempt modest dieting, and ultimately devise a scheme where Mr. Fairlamb briefly starves himself before lunch meetings. The satire targets the era's obsession with reducing diets and fitness crazes—presented as simultaneously ridiculous and ineffective. The couple's elaborate schemes (pedometers, gym attendance, elaborate meal-timing) highlight how people devise complicated workarounds rather than simply eating less. The joke culminates in the husband's modest success through calculated restraint, suggesting that weight loss requires uncomfortable discipline rather than fashionable remedies.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
1. Just as the newspapers were full of anti-fat cam- paigns and so on, the Fair- lambs made the harrowing discovery that they and their spats were no longer on meeting terms. With cold weather coming on, obvious- ly something must be done about it. After serious de- liberation they decided. to join the girth control move ment, and purchased a com- plete set of instructions for home calisthenics Girth Control 2. The instructions, how- ever, were inadequate. Mr. Fairlamb lay on his back and raised himself twelve times by the nape of the neck. but was then unable to find any directions for getting on his feet again. Fortunately, the janitor had a rope and pulley handy, but the Fairlambs felt that it would be something of an imposition to go on with the calisthenics. and so they decided to go in for walking instead 3. Knowing each other’s distaste for that pastime they agreed to carry pedometers,—just so there wouldn’t be any cheating. At the end of two weeks, Mr. Fairlamb’s record suddenly leaped to 89. He had been making his office boy wear it. To-day the boy, in waggish mood, had jiggled it up and down to the astounding total. Mr. F.’s domestic position would have been far more critical if at that moment the poodle had not capered in with his mistress’s pedometer still hanging about its neck 4. The Fairlambs then decided that the most sensible thing to do would be to diet. This time they would really see the thing through, and Mr. F. was actually jovial over his modest dinner of oyster broth with two slices of rusk (no butter). He would usually start for the office right after dinner to clean up some work, and Mrs. F. usually found some meeting to take her out. The dénouement occurred at a nearby restaurant on the twenty-third day of their diet 5. It was in this crisis of their affairs that Mr. Fair- lamb had his brilliant idea. After all, he observed to Mrs. F., they had no objection to being fat; the only thing they minded was not being able to get their spats on in cold weather. He is really a rather clever man in his way, as his wife is fond of saying, and with a pencil and paper he had the whole thing figured out in ten minutes, working plans and all. The Fair- lambs are happy once more comicbooks.com