Upsetting Day: Man and Strife

Ahhh, marriage!

Phil Hirsch spent the '60s and '70s shoving lazy and terrible cartoons into themed "humor" books. He covered all the fandoms of the time: hamburgers, tits, vampires, prostitutes. But his least inspired, most bitter effort probably came in 1965 when he published one on marriage. man and Strife - 130 hysterical cartoons about the high cost of loving is, as they said at the time, worse than a meatloaf phone bill.

From what I can tell, married life wasn't complicated in the sixties. You bought a virgin who hated you and then her mother haunted your alcoholism. So Phil's team of cartoonists really only had six things to joke about. The first one is…

Murdering your husband is funny. Normally I'd add some unexpected twist to a statement like that, but comedy was not layered with sophistication in a 1965 joke book. If a cartoonist drew a dead spouse in a Phil Hirsch book, the only thing left to do was send the invoice. So buckle your meatloaf, mother-in-law! We're about to take a look at some of the zaniest times a wife tried to kill her husband in Man and Strife!

"You and Tom haven't been arguing again?" is such a strange assumption to make when Tom's wife answers the door with a smoking handgun and a thousand-yard-stare. Maybe it's a typo and this lady meant the opposite? No, Phil Hirsch is too good an editor to let a mistake go to print. The gag must be this woman heard shots and checked to make sure it was ordinary spousal gunfire, not argument gunfire? I think this is the point I was trying to make. Killing a husband was so funny in 1965 you could slap any incoherent shit under a picture of it and it would get published. Anything would have worked here. "Sounds like your afternoon got freed up!" "It's a lucky day for both of us– I'm selling carpet treatments!" "Can I borrow a cup of husband corpse penis?" Anything.

"What's the occasion?" asks the husband as he sits down to dinner. "His wife silently pulls a gun from a casserole dish," says the punchline. It's fantastic. There's not even a twist since he knows this is some kind of scheme. It's a murder everyone saw coming. But look at how happy she is. These are the scribbles of a cartoonist who can't draw tables, bodies, limbs, dishes, backgrounds, hands, hair, flowers, or chairs. He signed his name TRsn_n_. And yet TRsn_n_'s mad scrawlings have somehow rendered a zen-like contentment in this wife's tired eyes. Whatever happens next, she will always have this perfect moment. Not every husband murder has to be funny. Some can merely be beautiful.

This cartoon is wobbling on some real rickety scaffolding. The wife has given her husband a mystery novel with a secret gun in it. At first, I didn't see the string, so I figured it must have been a '60s wife trope to trick a husband into getting his fingerprints on a gun. But no, this is a death trap built into a book. But how? There is no suspension of disbelief that will allow for this. This cartoon's most generous audience will say, "Reading does not work like this." It's like setting up a joke with, "What's the deal with Thursdays being Mondays!?" and ending it with "Come on, step on the landmine, wife."

I'm not done talking about it. I don't think I'm splitting hairs when I say this is a faulty premise. Any mystery lover would instantly know something was wrong with the heft of the book. And why the impossible trap at all? This is a man who will sit down and fully read a book -he does not enjoy- because his wife recommended it. Tell him a bottle of poison is yummy. Hand him a magazine and blow his head off while he says, "Thank you, I'll read the entire thing!" Simple. Fucking, you're welcome, awful 1965 cartoonist.

This one almost works, but you have to disengage quick before you imagine the backstory. Not only of this married couple, but of the cartoonist whose creative process was, "Okay, think… something about suicide, something about suicide… GOT IT! HIS WIFE DOESN'T CARE!" So let's move on to something other than dead husbands. One of the other things every '60s cartoonist liked to joke about was…

I don't know where or when women invented having sex for fun, but I know it was not with cartoonists in 1965.

All sex during this era was transactional, so if your wife answered the door in lingerie, it was a trick. She needed something from you. The frigid untrustworthiness of Woman is not the worst setup to comedy, so I really only have notes on the execution. If this man had said, "Those are your fuck pajamas. You must have broken another toilet," and his shirt said "Ask me about my wife's diarrhea" we wouldn't be here. But instead of landing on a punchline, the cartoonist brainstormed a list of possibilities. None of them are fun and maybe he was disarmed by the allure of his own drawing, but two of them are weirdly sexual. If you're trying to list non-erotic things, and you say "eat out" and "your mother is coming," you blew it. You simply don't know how to write non-horny men. Let's look at another example of this.

This cartoon needlessly explores sex as an apology across two pages. What's notable here is the deliberate lack of jokes. The author had all these panels, all these opportunities for the wife to get distracted by woman things like painting her nails or detaching and disposing of her menstrual belt or revealing her true form to a dark incubus, but no. She burned dinner, burned dinner, burned dinner, and burned dinner, and now her husband has to eat ass. It took this fucker five drawings to show a lady reading a newspaper. That's like disappearing for 14 years and saying, "I'm back from sketching a snowman."

This one is sort of cute. It's not so much a joke about women hating sex, but about this guy being so bad at grabbing titties that his own bride punched him. We can all relate to those stakes. Now let's see how this concept gets executed by a maniac:

This woman is so afraid of consummating her marriage she is going to listen to her husband die from the other side of bricks like an Edgar Allan Poe story. To her credit, this guy doesn't seem like he showed a lot of interest in her. He only hears what he wants. I've met a lot of women who wanted to seal me in a tomb forever, but I know that because I'm a good listener, not because I got surprised by a wall of masonry after I brushed my teeth. The point is, this joke is sort of counting on the reader knowing women hate to fuck, which is a pretty ancient type of misogyny. But it's one I want you to keep in mind when we talk about another problem every cartoonist of the era faced:

Ugh, they constantly need it. Their ovums swell like ovulating baboons, these wives.

I reject the premise of this one completely. The decision to draw a little hat over the husband's boner gives it all away. This guy is not here to "cure" his wife having sex with other men at all. What they're up to is so obvious the punchline should have been "No mouth stuff, pal. I'm not here to jerk it to you falling in love."

Martha is the best. I don't know what the rules are in her universe or what the author is trying to say, but I love the idea of flagging down a waiter by jumping on the table and ripping off your clothes. And yet it's such a baffling and unfunny decision to have nine people reacting to this, and not one of them is like, "Oh hell yeah, Martha." Look at how grouchy they are! Martha must just do this all the goddamn time.

Gladys solves her problems the same way as Martha, but at least her strip tease is loosely linked to the laws governing reality. She and her husband are fighting about him going to a burlesque show and her side of the argument is "we have burlesque at home." And they do! Gladys is a vibrating Picasso painting of a woman. She's every shape and none, a layered jello salad of sexual presentation. The artist specifically chose to draw the dead center of Gladys' ass jiggling. Hey, buddy! Your wife has motion lines coming out of her birth canal! Hang up that phone and get in there, nerd!

"Honey? What if a bride was such a trollop she dropped a hanky at another suitor before she was even done with her marriage ceremony? Is that funny? To be clear, that's the whole thing, there's nothing else! Honey? Oh, there's no one here? I'm alone? I've always been alone? Because I don't understand what it means to be human? Okay! Thanks, I love you!"

So Tom's wife isn't getting enough sex now that he's in prison, but instead of a joke it kind of trails off… it's like some haunting puzzle. What about this suggested it was even trying to be funny to Phil Hirsch? This isn't a gag that swung and missed, this is the start of a divorce. Is it ironic because though apart they each suffer the same heartache? Is the prison an allegory for their emotional barriers? Probably not, but it makes more sense than anyone at any time looking at this and thinking, "comedy!" And hold on… if this is art, that means the cubist vagina jiggles of Gladys were art! I knew it!

If this cartoon looks familiar, it's because Phil Hirsch also included it in his book of hooker jokes. In the context of prostitute cartoons, it fell flat because you can't say, "here's a book of prostitute jokes and this one is one about a prostitute being a prostitute." There needs to be some kind of turn. And here, in this context, there still isn't one. "My wife is a prostitute, I'm quite upset with her about it," remains less than a full joke. It needs a bit more like, "Those guys get anything they want for $80, but I paid for your beauty school and can't even get you to pee on me while I cry." Maybe not exactly that, but you get it. Fucking put in the effort, Bob Tupper.

This is my favorite take on the unquenchable lust of wives in a sexless marriage. This naked woman got rejected, but all I can think about is her sex hat. Is it a sex hat? Or did she make the unsexy mistake of forgetting to take off her regular hat when she got nude? Is it a stereotype that men only look a woman in her hat? I can't tell- is he also naked? I am confused in a completely non-frustrating way. I barely know what the author was going for, but I love it and I love how I have no idea why I love it. Five out of five sex hats.

This, on the other hand, sucks. How is this husband supposed to pick up on his wife's sex signals if she's not wearing her sex hat? And was "Hi!" really your punchline? Have the naked lady do some newspaper wordplay like, "Let me know when you get to that wet dick section" or "Honey, what did the obituaries say about my nipples, my poor missing nipples."

I'd say this cartoon takes a lot for granted about how all husbands are mesmerized by newspapers, but it might have been a really common truism at the time. Men being helpless to the call of the newspaper is a theme throughout the entire book:

Wives are so desperate for attention they shoot toast through newspapers or simply light them on fire. I don't get it. Reading the paper was the paper's intended purpo– never mind. It was sixty years ago. A lot of the ideas being explored by these cartoonists… I…

Whether it was incompetence, madness, or the passage of time, I don't know what the shit is going on in some of these.

So this guy is buying a woman and the man selling her is offering to take off her price tag. I get that. But why? What is the context? You can't go from zero to purchasing a woman, and then have your only observation be, "What if buying a human was like buying a sweater?" Yeah, that was already your premise, you dumb shit. And speaking of dumb shit, yeah, take off her price tag. She's to be fed to Adzis Kahnym, I don't need a fucking gift receipt.

So much for the preliminaries? The preliminaries for what? The main event of your wedding night sex? Does that mean the two of you, just now, made love to each other's friends and families?

Ladies, if your groom turns to you and says, "Well so much for the preliminaries!" as you leave your wedding, brick him into the bathroom. That's a man who will never know how to fuck. I can't conceive of a world chaste enough and a confidence unearned enough to allow for a smug little comment like this. It's crazy to think our grandfathers both had to figure out how their junk worked as adults on their wedding nights, but also may have gone into it talking a big game. My point is, "aww, our poor grandmothers," is a bad thing for a cartoon to make you feel.

A lot of the cartoons in the book are about how wives are always taking their husbands' money, but this one forgot to add a joke, and maybe forgot the entire concept of comedy. This is too many drawings and way too many steps to steal the wallet of a sleeping man. Why try this and why would she think she could get away with it? Is there really a home intruder and she can hear her husband being killed? And if not, won't he have a pretty good lead on a suspect when he finds an empty wallet where only he and his wife live? This cartoon is a clumsy drawing of an idiot's idea of nothing. I can't even be sure she's stealing the wallet from his pants. This could be a wife saying "Get out of here so E.T. and I can play cards."

You were expecting your wife? Well, yeah, naked guy! We kind of figured! But it's weird your wife would knock, and also weird the man who drew you didn't include some kind of punchline. It's like someone caught this cartoonist drawing a nude man finding a dead woman and this caption was how he scrambled for an excuse.

You, of course, have no idea what the fuck this means. I had to look it up, and it's a reference to a choir TV show with three seasons that went off the air a year before this book was published. This is a nonsensical, hail mary of an empty pop culture reference. Why? FOr what? And who could care!? It's like publishing a book of jokes today and one of them is a wife telling a marriage counselor, "He simply won't install JoJo Siwa: Worldwide Party on his Nintendo Switch, your honor." And look at the husband. He is remorseless about not Singing Along With Mitch. If I had to guess, he looks almost proud of it, that bastard.

This one came out of nowhere. I guess Man and Strife is 129 hysterical cartoons about the high cost of loving, and one about the social challenges of breeding children who are 25% horse.

Sometimes the bitter lovelessness of marriage never really has anything to grab hold of. What is this wife referencing? If this guy claimed to be a pagan sex god, we weren't there for it. They know this! But she seems mad, so he must have really botched whatever he tried. And there are no clues in the illustration. If they were trying to draw a guy who goes for wild, demonic shit in bed, I'd argue they missed. Seriously, what the fuck does it mean? Let's do a fun one.

This guy hates his mother-in-law so much his name for her is turning himself inside out mouth-first. I have a soft spot for this one because I've had it labeled "Mother hole" in my Photoshop layers all week and it made me happy every time I looked at it. I took a screenshot:

And since I know you're going to ask, here's the one I cut called "Freezer Eskimos (No)":

It's adorable! The wife is so bad at refrigerator a whole little ecosystem has emerged! The tiny people have reindeer, and ham industry! I don't have anything bad to say about it specifically; it's great, but it carries the troubling implication that if these cartoonists could only let go of their hatred for their wives, they'd be capable of creating entire magical worlds.

For instance, this is nonsense born of violent resentment. This man's wife has ordered so many products from Milady's, her husband is going to attack the delivery boy. At least I hope that's who he's going to attack. It's nuts either way, and it's the crumbling foundation upon which the joke is built, which is that the delivery boy is too large to defeat. Is it mere bad luck? New company policy after so many husbands fought them? We can't know. We are jumping into the 4th minute of a premise-heavy Saturday Night Live sketch as it bombs. But enough of these lazy guesses at Earth humor. Let's move on to the main area of these cartoonists' expertise:

You knew this was going to be one of the sections as soon as you saw I was doing sections.

It took this cartoonist 19 words to rewrite the cliche "you're letting in flies," and none of them were spent trying to explain the premise. His wife is deciding if she's ready to leave him forever, and that's such a normal experience for the author he thought two suitcases communicated it. If I hadn't seen the same cartoonist draw twenty wives getting murdered throughout the book, I would have assumed this was a woman wondering if she packed everything she needed for a weekend trip. The caption should have said, "Only a lunatic would look at this and think they drew a woman leaving a marriage. Only a hateful, stupid lunatic."

This one is pretty good. "Fuck you, wife. I'm spending our anniversary drinking alone." It's funny because she deserves it.

Here's a great example of how a little backstory can help. We don't know this couple, or their history. And I'm not saying there are a lot of reasons I will accept for jamming a phone into a woman's skull, but as a storyteller, I think you have to at least offer one. Let me show you how it's done:

This is what I mean by backstory. You can tell from this man's nose that he rammed a bottle down his harpy wife's throat because he was drunk. See, the joke works when you give it a little context.

We all know the old stereotype of how hardworking men love office gossip. What this cartoon does is elevate that to an absurd degree! Normally you'd ramp up to "find your wife bound and gagged by what you hope were only burglars," but this is fine too. They're the classic odd couple of a self-important asshole and a woman brutalized by unknown criminals still at large. Ha, now I'm the one making Sing Along with Mitch references.

The wife talked on the phone so much she died. Sorry, I'm not telling the joke right, let me try again. The wife talked on the phone so much she died.

This cartoon is a pox where happiness once grew. But there is a satisfaction we can pull from it. You may have seen when someone posts on social media, "I don't like when people do this thing," and then all the fucking "joke" replies doing that exact thing. We already hated those people, but when they find out they were copying 1965's shittiest, woman-hatingest cartoonist, they might also hate themselves. This is getting too grim. Let's move on to…

… oh, fuck. Not this one. Why would… has she not heard the phrase she's referencing? Can she not see the big stick he's carrying? It's like the cartoonist wanted to do something clever about killing a woman with a stick and gave up way, way, way too early in the process. I shouldn't have included this one…

… oh, fuck, or this one. He's taking his wife to obedience school? That's it? That's the whole comic? He's marching his wife into a kennel and telling them, "Teach this fucking dog to sit."? Dennis, are you sure about this one? Computer, enhance.

Dennis? Was the arm grabbing necessary? Did you not consider this was several steps too far? If you drew them parked outside with him pointing at the building as a warning, I would have said, "Oh, this cartoonist hates women." But this!? Fully leading her to dog prison in a hammer lock!? Dennis, there is no way you didn't try to kill your wife. Which, oh no, perfectly brings me to the final section.

It was a mistake to read this book.

"Good evening, the remains of an unknown woman were found at the bottom of a lake today, but one local cartoonist thinks the story may have had a… very funny beginning. S. λartiS(?), thank you for joining us…"

Sorry, I think the newscaster bit would have landed better if the artist's name wasn't S. λartiS.

This husband had the same hilarious idea of sinking his wife to a watery grave, but thought better of it. Every couple goes through something like this– one of you gets 70% into a drowning murder and stops to say, "Okay, okay, sorry! Let's everybody catch our breath here. We were both a little bit wrong. We were both, a little bit, not Singing Along with Mitch."

Of all the words you'd expect under a picture of a woman being tied to the train tracks, these might be the saddest. This is the man who invented sniffing panties' best guess at a wife's last words. This woman is so entrenched in a cycle of victimhood she's trying to nurture her abuser right up until the train hits. And that, as you've noticed, could never hope to be funny. Which proves my theory that at one point in human history, meatloaf was a sacred comedy word that made any joke work, even a mirthless wife slaying such as this. Here, I'll show you:

I wished you were dead, wife.

Yes. Yes.

See? It doesn't work without the meatloaf. You also need to make sure you're reading the panels in order. The cartoonist labeled it for you– it goes (1) and then (2).

I was about to say maybe our ancestors thought killing your wife was funny right up until it got too real. But I think the joke in this one is that, ha ha, the husband really went through with it? And it was still somehow considered a punchline! It's a terrible one to end on! Bye!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Joshua Graves, a Photoshop file named 'Mother Hole Final_v3_2_REALFINAL.psd.'

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM