Life — August 14, 1931 — page 6: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "Baby Turns Big Business Man" This satirical piece mocks the absurdities of corporate bureaucracy through a baby's perspective. A harried office manager (Miss Maloney) addresses an infant, treating it as a serious employee while delivering mundane workplace complaints: forgotten gates, damaged merchandise, ledger discrepancies, and equipment maintenance. The humor derives from the incongruity of conducting professional business with a baby—discussing "colic," teething, and bottle-feeding alongside corporate procedures, insurance liability, and stockholder concerns. The satirist (Jack Cluett) suggests that corporate management has become so mechanized and depersonalized that even infants could perform these roles equally well. The cartoons show the baby sitting at a desk and in a crib, visually reinforcing how infantilized adult corporate work has become—a common modernist critique of early 20th-century industrialization.