Life, 1927-05-26 · page 17 of 39
Life — May 26, 1927 — page 17: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
The top cartoon satirizes women's fashion obsession with "back polishing"—applying polish to expose low-neckline evening gowns. Lloyd Mayer's column mocks how women discuss this beauty trend in hushed, dramatic tones, treating it as scandalous. The humor lies in elevating a trivial grooming practice to pseudo-forbidden status. The right-side cartoon, "A Quiet Party in the Future," depicts a wild saxophone jazz party. Its caption predicts that when everyone masters the saxophone, parties will become unbearably loud. This satirizes both the era's jazz craze and the common fear that popularizing something ruins it—a commentary on 1920s cultural anxieties about mass entertainment and social homogenization.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
“M* dear, HAVE you heard about this simply YE GiVINE iDEA of ‘BACK polishing’ which some- body in LONdon has thought up? I mean I have ACtually never HEARD of anything so frightfully inTRIguing because the iDEA of having your BACK polished when you are wearing a very LOW-neck EVEning gown is TOO deLIcious, don’t you HON- estly think it IS? Because you KNOW, my dear, how simply reVOLTing your BACK looks when HALF of it is SUNburned or something and the OTHer lralf of it is sort of GOOSEfleshy and POTIsonous-looking? Well, ANYways, when you have one of these BACK- polishers polish you up for a party, they sort of POLish MADly at your BACK until it is all sort of a simply FAScinating I1Vory color—ean you BEAR it, my dear? But the thing that actually SLAYS me, my dear, is that maybe these BACK polishers will be th je class of THUGS you mect in these foul SHOEshine places. Because I mean you can iMAGine the humiliAtion of having some perfectly FOUL person working on your BACK, my dear, and making positively inSULTing re- MARKS about your SHOULder-blades in GREEK, so that you can’t understand a WORD of it! I mean whenever I THINK of it I get so MAD I could GARgle BUTtermilk—I mean I ACtually DO!” Lloyd Mayer. The Real News I DON'T know what's coming over the newspapers. More and more they seem to be fumbling the real news. Recently they whooped up the achievement of an Englishman who kissed his wife good-by, boarded a ship for this country, and soon after landing here, drove an automobile at a speed of over two hundred and sev- enty miles an hour, or nearly fifty miles an hour faster than a car that side-swiped mine when I was out driving with my wife the other day. Now I'll grant that that's a pretty good achievement. But can it hold a candle to the achievement of the Englishman’s wife? She stayed in England and successfully held at bay a tempta- tion to sit in the back seat. Has any other married woman in all automotive history ever done that?* _ Tupper Greenwald. ‘One thousand times no. “H OW did you people like the film last night?” “Oh, it was wonderful! We found a parking place in the same block!” A Quiet Party in the Future WHEN EVERY ONE IN THE WORLD HAS LEARNED HOW TO BECOME POPULAR BY MASTERING THE SAXOPHONE, comicbooks.com