No Fooling! It's the Annual Wit & Humor Exhibition



You Don’t Say! Wordless Cartoons from the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor examines the art of cartooning without words. Sometimes referred to as picture stories, pantomimes, captionless cartoons, and more commonly, cartoons without words, the characters depicted remain silent--no speech balloons and thought clouds interfere with the cartoon itself--ensuring that the joke or punch line is universally understood. A centuries-old art form, the cartoon without words essentially evolved out of the eighteenth century caricature. In the nineteenth century, this form of visual expression was refined in both the cartoon and comic strip formats. Creating this pantomime world are the cartoon artists whose work continues to influence and delight readers, contemporary cartoonists, and scholars around the world.

This exhibition draws on the Library’s collection of cartoon masters from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, their own comic influences as well as their contemporaries. Viewers may recognize some cartoonists and learn about the work of others for the first time. On display are the published works of A.B. Frost, H.M. Bateman, Otto Soglow ("The Little King"), Marge ("Little Lulu"), Mik ("Ferd'nand"), e.o. plauen ("Vater und Sohn"), George Baker ("The Sad Sack"), Antonio Prohias ("Spy vs. Spy"), Don Martin ("Mad's maddest artist"), and many more. On view in the Skylight Gallery, Sixth Floor, Main Library, through May 31.

The Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor (SCOWAH) is the happy result of the biblio-adventures of one man, Nat Schmulowitz--lawyer, library commissioner, and humanist—who collected humor from around the world. One aspect of his collecting habit included the search for cartoons without words; SCOWAH is a rich source of the classic examples of this comic style. On April 1, 1947, as a measure of his interest in the Library, Mr. Schmulowitz presented ninety-three jest books, including an edition of the Hundred Merry Tales, the first step toward the establishment of a research collection of wit and humor.