1940.02.10 “Hitler’s Stooge”
by L Day
15 x 19 in., grease pencil on board
Coppola Collection
I can find no evidence for an L Day, or even more than a handful of “Day”s as artists, but this is the second drawing from this artist that I have. I speculatively dated the other one to 1939, and it was also depicting the relationship between Hitler and Mussolini.
I think this one is also pre-WW2. The emphasis on “stooge” (I speculate) was inspired by the publicity that the first-ever Hollywood satire of the Axis leaders. Usually this is a reference to Chaplin’s “Great Dictator” (October 1940), but, in fact, the Three Stooges released a short in January 1940 that got a lot of press. Called “You Nazty Spy,” the short embeds all the usual, mile-a-minute visual and verbal jokes one expects from the Stooges. Even if this cartoon is not referencing this, I am arguing for the association as a reminder that might drive you to check out how political that episode was at a time when US isolationism was still the order of the day.
