Life, 1926-09-02 · page 24 of 41
Life — September 2, 1926 — page 24: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This comic strip satirizes the effectiveness of advertising slogans through repetition. The cartoon depicts a grocer's customer who repeatedly forgets items despite seeing the store's prominent slogan displayed above the counter. The humor lies in the irony: the slogan—presumably meant to help customers remember what they need—instead becomes a running joke about human forgetfulness. Each panel shows the customer entering, leaving, and returning multiple times, apparently unable to retain their shopping list despite the visual reminder. The caption "proving conclusively the value of a well-chosen slogan" is tongue-in-cheek mockery. The strip suggests that even clever advertising cannot overcome basic human absent-mindedness. This reflects early 20th-century skepticism about whether commercial messaging could truly influence consumer behavior, poking fun at advertising's grandiose claims about persuasion and memory retention. The joke targets both consumer behavior and advertising industry pretensions.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
bed r HE UNEARTHLY,” by Robert Hichens (Cosmopol- itan), reminds me of that im- mortal stanza: “King lomon and King David led very merry lives, Their concubines were numerous, and numerous their wives; But as old age o'ertook them, they got religious qualms, So Solomon wrote the Proverbs and David wrote the Psalms.” Because, after making his reputation through exotic atmosphere and warm WISERF HERR RI= «Lie and Letters and worldly heroines, one of whom inspired our Mr. Arthur Guiterman to his deathless line, “I hope to God n bit her!” he has now, in the twilight of his career, turned to the second coming of Christ for mate- rial, and written a novel around a Russian Jew, Peter Kharkoff, who makes every one he meets long to be a better boy or girl, and sciously elderly woman from the comfortable fastnesses of her cathedral town and a young one uncon- draws an The Forgetful Customer PROVING CONCLUSIVELY THE VALUE OF A WELL-CHOSEN SLOGAN. from the gaieties of the London season at a time of the year when Geneva, his temporary headquarters, is no place for any individual not vitally concerned with the League of Nations. It is all very spiritual and noble, even if, in ordér to make an ending, the most attractive cha in the cast is suicide. I must state frankly that the Mes- sianic motif in fiction is one of which I prefer to steer clear. There is money in it, of course, as the tre- mendous box-office success of “The Fool” proved, but the trouble is that the modern perpetrators of the theme fail to give the Apostles credit for an assist. rd floors back may come and go, but the Sermon on the Mount is still available even in our fifth- rate hostelrics, and if I am to be given any Gospel, I want to take it straight. If, however, you care to watch a London Society girl journey from things that are seen and tem- poral to those that are unseen and eternal, “The Unearthly” is the book for you. The course is five hundred and twenty pages, but you can skip the frequent passages in which she merely looks out the window and thinks. Even though Mr. Hichens dismisses Imogen as cured, I should not like to wager on the outcome of her next encounter with an attractive young man. acter forced to commit HE CABALA,” by Thornton Niven Wilder (Albert and Charles Boni), is something really choice, and I recommend it herewith to all those who are eager to keep in touch -with the best in modern lit- erature. On second thought, I recommend it even to those who aren't. It consists of five episodic sketches of members of the sophis- ticated Roman group which gives it title, who, when functioning nor- mally, “blocked, from a purely dis- interested love of Church tradition, the canonization of several tiresome nonentities;...saved the taxpayers of Rome the purchase of hundreds of modern Italian paintings;..- (Continued on page 32) comicbooks.com