Hidden Humor / World War One camouflage cartoons

I have just premiered a new 14-minute documentary video talk, titled HIDDEN HUMOR: World War One Cartoonists' Views of Camouflage. It is free to view (and to share with others) on YouTube at <https://youtu.be/V6silNdlL3l>. It is not only about wartime camouflage but revisits the surprising (and often amusing) connections between art, fashion design, women's rights, bootlegging, and ship camouflage—as became a favorite focus of newspaper cartoons and comics before and after WWI.

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G. Stanley Hall (1920)—

Humor is perhaps the best camouflage for fear. In looking over the files of the trench journals of the Allies nothing has struck me more forcibly than the desperate and pathetic attempts to jest, even about death itself in its more horrid aspects.

Nov shmoz ka pop / WWI spurious wacko camouflage

an inept attempt at camouflage / WWI

Gene Ahern (originator in 1921 of the Our Boarding House comic strip featuring Major Hoople), "Ain't Nature Wonderful: Camouflage Still Yet" in Fort Wayne Sentinel, August 14, 1918, p. 3—

About this camouflage music, we juggle the camouflage art on themselves so they would be in their seventh heaven, and have their victims turning flip flaps. A book agent could waft into your office camouflaged as a puff of cigar smoke, and could annoy you with special offers, beautiful bindings, subscriptions, etc., and the only way to get rid of him is to purchase a piece of his stock, because you can't get a toe hold on him to throw him out because he's camouflaged invisible.

Insurance posts could wear the same harness, so you're in for it, fellow citizens, and the only exit for you is to take a try at the camouflage trick yourself.

F'rinstance: Have a 6x3 ebony box in your office and when an ill wind shows up, camouflage yourself like you just expired and fall into the silver-handled box and have on your fizz a camouflaged doesn't-he-look-natural expression.

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus