Life, 1922-03-02 · page 22 of 34
Life — March 2, 1922 — page 22: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This essay-cartoon mocks the archetypal insurance salesman obsessed with his single product. "Jones" represents a type: a man who reduces every conversation—whether about traffic accidents, business, or casual club chat—to insurance opportunities. The satire targets his relentless sales pitch, his ability to extract probability tables and complex formulas at any moment, and his complete inability to recognize when someone is joking or uninterested. The narrator's final plea—to be "insured...against being insured"—is the punchline: Jones cannot even comprehend someone wanting protection *from* him. The bottom cartoon is a separate, simpler gag: a woman asks if her companion enjoys "Brahms" (the composer); he misunderstands it as "bran" (a breakfast cereal), preferring shredded wheat biscuits. It's a pun-based joke about mishearing.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
LIFE Everyjones I were given to writing things about people I don’t like (which, of course, I am), I should write about my friend Jones. (One’s friend in these cases is so apt to be Jones.) Jones is a man of a single and fixed idea. His idea is his business. That, of course, is a good idea. It would be a good thing if more people were thus firmly concentrated on their own business. But Jones’s business is every- one’s business, or, at any rate, he makes it so. His business is insurance. Jones will insure you against burg- lary, alcoholism, marriage, divorce, or anything like that. Whenever I meet Jones at the club (which is the place all this sort of thing always happens), he sits down next me, or opposite me if I chance to be at lunch, and begins to talk about his idea. The conversation never progresses very far before he whips out his pencil and exclaims, “Let’s see; you're thirty-two.” I make no denial, and he begins calcu- lating. “H’mm,” he mutters, “good thing we thought of this while you are still so young.” We indeed! “Here's the whole thing: straight life, 155; partial payment life, 230; partial-accelerative-full-payment-endowment 7 “Look here, Jones,” I protest, “I’m not going to die.” “Of course not,” he replies, “at least, not immediately. But eventually, of course, all of us...” If you know Jones, you know how ineffectual argument can be. It makes no difference what topic I introduce. | be- gan hurriedly the other day, on the Fifth Avenue traffic sys. tem. I couldn’t have chosen worse. “Yes, yes,” said Jones, “A marvelous system. But it does not prevent accidents, Why, just the other day I saw a most ghastly thing. \ man was knocked down and fatally injured by a mail truck. | couldn't help thinking, as I watched the tragedy from where I stood among the horrified by-standers, how much it would have meant to him if he had only taken out one of our First-payment-premium-beneficent—” “Jones,” I interrupted, a happy thought striking ne, “I want to be insured.” In a second the table was civered with probability curves, slide rules and dotted lines. “Any- thing,” he exclaimed, extracting an octavo volume from his hip pocket. “Fire, damage to clothing, dishonest bootleg- gers...” “No,” I went on, “it’s far simpler than that. | am thirty-two years old. I want—” “Yes, yes,” he said ex- citedly, turning over the leaves of his book. “I want to be insured for twenty years on any system you may ‘ame, against being insured. Jones did not understand. One's friend Jones so scldom does. Roger Burling What Are Brahms? She: Tell me, are you fond of Brahms? Oh, very! But I think I like shredded wheat biscuits even better. comicbooks.com