Life, 1929-04-19 · page 34 of 52
Life — April 19, 1929 — page 34: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes absurd spending habits of New Yorkers in the Jazz Age. The cartoonist (signed "Cesare") mocks the wealthy and aspirational middle class for wasteful expenditures: - **Theatre scalping**: Paying $18 for $4.40 tickets—exploitative ticket reselling - **Celebrity-named sandwiches**: Overpriced restaurant gimmicks named after celebrities who wouldn't actually eat there - **Jazz-leader worship**: Crowds following a bandleader like the Pied Piper - **Night clubs**: Patrons knowingly called "suckers" yet willingly paying inflated prices - **Six-day bicycle races**: Attending "fixed" events they don't believe in or care about The "Believe It or Not" title parodies the popular contemporary odditorium feature. The sidebar jokes about theatrical tickets use "S.R.O." (Standing Room Only) wordplay. The overall message: New Yorkers spend money foolishly on entertainment, either through exploitation or self-delusion.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
New York Life Our Own Believe it or Not oxerencises CaCI xe (Li eo; There are at the present time in New York, otherwise intelli- gent individuals who pay as high as $18.00 apiece for $4.40 theatre tickets. Ata certain restaurant scores of peo- ple daily pay the price of a perfectly good meal just to dull their teeth on inane sandwiches named after celeb- tities who wouldn't frequent the place on a bet! SEATS NEXT DOOR 3» a ot : rN The same sophisticated me- tropolis possesses a jazz-leader, a sort of modern Pied Piper— who is slavishly followed by fair hordes of music-lovers whenever he strolls to and from work, There actually exist queer night-club patrons who will hand out hun- dreds and hundreds of perfectly good dollars, just to be called “Suck- er”! And last, but most unbelievable of all, there are droves of legally sane per- sons who spend night after night in watching six-day bicycle races, which they firmly believe to be fixed, and in which they are not in the least inter- ested anyway. Gyps from the Old Block What S. R. O. means now... And the ticket scalpers tell us that anyone can get good seats at any hit at box-office prices if they get them SEATS RIGHT OUTSIDE. The Scalper also deals in tickets to the poorhouse. a week ahead! Note—Exhibit A on the right is the bill for five seats bought by a member of Lirs’s staff. The Road to the Movies is paved with high priced theatre tickets. When a show is “sold out” it means that the theatre-goer is too. comicbooks.com