Life — April 5, 1928 — page 22: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a visual joke about hay fever (allergic rhinitis). The comic shows a small man's escalating misery across eight panels: **The sequence:** A woman in a grass skirt dances increasingly energetically while the man watches from progressively lower positions. Each panel shows him getting worse—sneezing, covering his face, and losing strength as she kicks up more dust and debris. **The joke:** The "hay" being kicked up from her grass skirt triggers his allergies, worsening with each dance move. What should be an entertaining tropical performance becomes torture for an allergy sufferer. **The punchline:** The final panel shows him bedridden with a fever, having collapsed from his allergic reaction—the title "Hay Fever!" is a literal pun. This relies on early-20th-century reader familiarity with hay fever as a recognizable seasonal affliction, often mocked as a "gentleman's complaint."