Arnold Zwicky's Blog

… the better to see the coming five days

The inspiration for this posting is Tom Toro’s cover “Incognito” for the New Yorker‘s 12/2/24 issue:

(#1) Farm turkeys in pre-Thanksgiving disguise; turkeys (which are not especially clever creatures) apparently believe that no one will see past their Groucho glasses, so that rather than experiencing a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block, they’ll be offered a cigar

So #1 is a big holiday ball of American pop culture; I wonder what your random Japanese, Turk, or Indonesian would make of it, even if you gave them the artists’s title as a clue.

But, it seems, Tom Toro — there’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings abut his cartooning — had an alternative take on the cover. From the New Yorker cover story, “Tom Toro’s “Incognito”: Putting on a friendly face” by Françoise Mouly on 11/25/24:

Thanksgiving, when many families come together, can be a source of both joy and tension. For the cover of the December 2, 2024, issue, the cartoonist Tom Toro suggests an alternative to the typical fraught topics: instead of discussing politics, older generations might want to acquaint younger generations with the origins of the funny glasses known as Groucho goggles (also called Fuzzy Puss glasses or, simply, a beagle puss). “There’s no jokester more delectable, to my taste, than Groucho Marx,” Toro said.

Also called Groucho glasses, as in the Wikipedia article:

Groucho glasses (also known as the beaglepuss) are a humorous novelty disguise which function as a caricature of the stage makeup used by the comedian Groucho Marx in his movies and vaudeville performances. They typically consist of black frames without lenses (either round or horn-rimmed) with attached features including bushy eyebrows, a large plastic nose, bushy moustache, and sometimes a plastic cigar.

Considered one of the most iconic and widely used of all novelty items in the world, Groucho glasses were marketed as early as the 1940s and are instantly recognizable to people throughout the world. The glasses are often used as a shorthand for slapstick and are depicted in the Disguised Face (🥸) emoji.

The Dark Days of December. Five days, 12/4-8, of death, destruction, and just deserts (marked with the black circle ⚫️), with a few bright celebratory interventions (marked with the red pushpin 📌):

— 12/4: ⚫️ Frank Zappa’s death day (1993); ⚫️ the feast day of St. Barbara, patron saint of those who work with explosives

— 12/5: ⚫️ Krampusnacht, on which the demonic creature Krampus punishes badly behaved children with birch rods; 📌 now turned into a raucous holiday celebration for adults; 📌 AMZ’s rehab return day (2020), on which I came home as a recovering alcoholic

(#2) Krampus with two terrified captive children

— 12/6: ⚫️ Mozart’s death day (1791), the disastrous end of a year that saw the first performance of Die Zauberflöte; 📌 Finnish Independence Day (1917); 📌 the feast day of St. Nicholas, who eventually became Santa Claus

(#3) Tom of Finland’s Santa in Boots (Mr. December in my 2024 ToF calendar)

— 12/7: ⚫️ Pearl Harbor Day (1941)

— 12/8 ⚫️ John Lennon’s death day (1980)

This entry was posted on December 3, 2024 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Anniversaries, Art, Cartoonists, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.