The Wasp — 1895 — page 364: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This page is primarily **advertising and directory listings** for San Francisco businesses (hotels, restaurants, saloons, printing services). The sole cartoon appears in the center-left: a sketched figure in a hat smoking a cigar, captioned "A GOOD EXCUSE." The accompanying text presents a humorous dialogue between a **Contractor and Clerk** about offering supervisory work in exchange for cigars. The joke hinges on the Contractor's absurd logic: he justifies not paying wages by claiming cigar-smoking will clog workers' throats so thoroughly they won't complain about unpaid labor. This satirizes **exploitative labor practices** and employer penny-pinching—offering cheap goods instead of actual compensation. The "excuse" is a darkly comic indictment of worker exploitation in the Gilded Age.