Life — July 26, 1923 — page 15: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a humorous narrative cartoon satirizing traffic hazards in early 20th-century urban America. The comic depicts a pedestrian's increasingly frantic attempts to avoid various motorized vehicles—cars, taxis, buses, and trolleys—while navigating city streets. Each panel shows the narrator narrowly escaping collisions with different vehicle types, demonstrating the period's anxiety about rapid automobile proliferation and urban congestion. The punchline appears at bottom: having successfully dodged all modern motorized traffic, the narrator's "accident" finally occurs when hit by an old-fashioned horse-drawn carriage—the very vehicle becoming obsolete. This satirizes the irony of modern hazards making people forget traditional dangers, and likely mocks the rapid technological transition reshaping American cities during the automotive age.