Popular Jokes #11

This November 1963 issue of Popular Jokes — Marvel's "The Big Laugh Magazine" — delivers the kind of absurdist humor that made digest comics a welcome break from the everyday. The cover sets the tone perfectly: a bespectacled, goateed scientist sits amid bubbling beakers and colorful lab equipment, looking smugly unruffled, while a wide-eyed blonde in a curve-hugging red outfit registers shocked surprise — the caption deadpanning, "That's right, Miss Borden — the human body is 97% water, but you upset my calculations!" At a quarter a copy, this is a snapshot of early-'60s comedic sensibility at its most cheerfully irreverent.