Life — April 24, 1924 — page 10: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Analysis: "Anything to Oblige" The cartoon depicts a restaurant scene where a **Restaurant Manager** and **Prohibition Director** are negotiating. The manager complains that "business is rotten" and they've "simply got to have another raid right away," asking the director to schedule one for next Tuesday at 9 PM. This satirizes **Prohibition-era corruption**. The joke is that raids—ostensibly enforcement actions against illegal alcohol—were actually *good for business*. A staged raid would generate publicity and appear legitimate to authorities, while the restaurant benefited from notoriety. The cartoon mocks how Prohibition enforcement became complicit with the very establishments it claimed to police, suggesting collusion between authorities and business owners for mutual profit.