1941.10.19 “Comic Relief”
by Ralph Lee (1906-1947)
14.7 x 23.3 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection
Ralph Lee was an editorial cartoonist for the Portland Oregonian. He died suddenly, at 41, in January 1947. His cousin, Art Bimrose, was the editorial cartoonist for the Oregonian for more than three decades. In 1937, the Oregonian hired him part-time to work on printing plates. Following Lee’s death, Bimrose was hired as the Sunday editorial cartoonist.
The central irony is that war propaganda has become entertainment. Europe, personified as a relaxed, smiling husband, chooses to listen to war propaganda for amusement, while the wife treats it like a favorite radio program with a recurring performer (“that new foreign heckler”).
So instead of propaganda being dangerous, manipulative, or frightening, it’s reduced to vaudeville noise—heckling, bluster, ranting.
To a US audience in October 1941, it would immediately evoke the Nazi and Fascist English-language propagandists. Their broadcasts were widely mocked in American newspapers as shrill, repetitive, absurdly overconfident, and unintentionally comic.
By late 1941, Europe is exhausted, battered, and saturated with propaganda. Europeans have heard so much of it that they now treat it cynically. Europe lives with the war; America listens to it. Americans are debating whether war talk is hysteria or necessity.
