Life — June 15, 1922 — page 23: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This nine-panel comic strip satirizes the anxiety and ordeal of visiting a dentist. Each panel depicts a man's escalating distress about a toothache—from initial denial ("O God!"), through searching for the dentist, to waiting in the office with mounting dread. The captions track his rationalizations ("Maybe it's only a cold in it," "Say, I believe it's quitting") and desperate hope ("The Doctor will see you"). The humor derives from the universal experience of dental fear: the man's exaggerated facial expressions and body language convey panic despite his attempts to minimize the problem. The references to specific magazine issues (Vogue June 1915, St. Nicholas May 1904) suggest this strip ran in *Life* magazine, which frequently published Flagg's humorous illustrated commentary on everyday American anxieties and social situations.