Life — May 27, 1926 — page 7: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "Keeping Fit for Business" This nine-panel comic satirizes the disconnect between health advice and actual lifestyle. The title "Or, A Good Start Is Half the Battle" suggests that maintaining fitness is supposedly essential for business success. The comic follows a businessman through increasingly absurd scenarios: waking to an alarm, exercising with determination, then progressively abandoning discipline—collapsing from exertion, being knocked down, falling apart while assembling things, relaxing by a fence, taking a shower, and finally reclining exhausted by a clock. The satire targets the era's business culture and self-help rhetoric promoting "fitness," while mocking how actual businessmen fail to maintain such regimens. The joke: good intentions about health quickly crumble under real-world pressures and laziness.