Stripper's Guide: Obscurity of the Day: It Is To Laugh

Monday, May 06, 2019

Obscurity of the Day: It Is To Laugh

Cole Johnson sent me this sample of Ving Fuller's It Is To Laugh many moons ago. I am usually meticulous about keeping his comments filed away with the samples, but in this case I have lost whatever context he offered for it. Obviously from the masthead this was produced when Ving was working at the New York Mirror in 1932, but how do I know it isn't just a one-shot item?

The microfilm record of the Mirror is very spotty, and exists only at the New York Public Library. Since I've not had my go-to New York guy, Jeffrey Lindenblatt, ever mention it to me, I'm guessing it is probably not microfilmed.

Luckily the interwebs has offered me a tiny crumb that would seem to prove that it was indeed a regular Mirror series. That's due to an offhand remark by Harry Lampert in an interview run in Alter Ego #148, which came up in my search results. Lampert says "There was a cartoonist in Washington Heights by the name of Ving Fuller. Ving Fuller did It Is To Laugh in the Daily News, and both Shelly [Mayer] and I were apprentices to Ving Fuller..."

Apparently Lampert misremembered the newspaper, but somehow all those years later he was able to dredge up the name of the feature Ving was working on during his early apprentice days.

Now if only we could figure out how long it ran ...

EDIT 8/31/2019: Carl Linich has the January 17 1932 page, and says that his copies of the next six Mirror Sunday issues do not include the feature.

Labels: Obscurities