C A M O U P E D I A: humor

Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts

Thursday, June 25, 2026

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.

•••

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.

Friday, April 3, 2026

a cubist romance / 'mong the cubes i'd love to ramble

Above Cubism predated WWI French Army camouflage, more or less. This still image is from Rigadin painter cubist [Rigadin the Cubist Painter] a film by Georges Monca (1912), Pathé. See online detail.

•••

All Aboard, a musical comedy that opened June 5, 1913 at Lew Fields' 44th Street Roof Garden in New York, as reviewed in The Sun, July 27, 1913, p. 12—

It is Ralph Riggs and his wife Katherine Witchie, who do the Cubist dance. The scene is in a studio of a Cubist and a Futurist painter and the lyrics of the song are as follows:

Said the Futurist boy to the Cubist girl

As they met on a poster blue:

"I don't know who the dickens I am—

and who in the deuce are you?"

Said the Cubist girl to the Futurist boy:

"We both were born, I think,

On a dark and dismal night last week

When the cat tipped over the ink."

Said the girl, "You must agree

We're awful sights to see."

Said the boy, "You seem to be

The girl that's made for me."

CHORUS

Oh, you Cubist girl, in cubes that curl

You little, wiggy-waggy, riggy-raggy,

ziggy-zaggy maid—

Picture puzzle queen,

From what I've seen

I think my style will suit you.

In the future when I'm painted

in every shade, like a crazy quilt,

although you're built,

to find you in the scramble

'Mong the cubes I'd love to ramble

A while some future day you'll be

My jumble ju-ju bee

My riggy-raggy,

Ziggy-zaggy,

Cubist girl.

Tuesday, January 6, 2026

a panoply of cartoonists' views of WWI camouflage

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

Sunday, December 28, 2025

I Never Met a Morphosis I Didn't Like / Smoke Dreams

Two British comic drawings (c1890s)

As I was growing up, adults used to discourage boys from smoking by saying, "Don't smoke or you'll turn into a cigarette." I never quite knew what that meant. But it was an ancient admonition, of the sort that I grew up on. I confirmed that about ten years ago, when I ran across a Victorian-era cartoon (it's the bottom row in the image above) in which (left to right) a smoking Cub Scout turns into a cigarette. Aha! Exactly as anticipated.

More recently, maybe ten days ago, I ran across another (no doubt British) cartoon, as seen in the upper row, in which a man (not a boy it seems) also becomes a cigarette. It even had a title that read THE EVOLUTION OF A CIGARETTE. No doubt a poke at Charles Darwin.

To me, these are of additional interest because they are Darwin-era examples of comic metamorphosis, which is of considerable interest. I have sometimes tried to write about that subject, not very successfully, and as recently as earlier this year, I gave an online talk about it, titled I Never Met a Morphosis I Didn't Like, as seen in the title slide below.

One might also benefit from my video on varieties of creativity, which is free to view online.

a slide talk on metamorphosis / Roy R. Behrens c2025

Tuesday, December 23, 2025

cleverly hidden in cotton clouds / a cartoon camouflage

Back in 2019, we blogged about and reproduced the drawing from a wartime cartoon by British artist Bernard Hugh. Originally published in The Bystander, it was reprinted in Cartoons Magazine in 1917. It proposed an ingenious method of camouflaging an airplane while in flight: that it could be camouflaged by sandwiching it between large clumps of cloud-like cotton wool. Looks like a fine idea to me. Recently, I fed Hugh's cartoon drawing to an AI processor, and the image above is what it produced.

RELATED LINKS

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

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

Sunday, December 14, 2025

turnip poses as onion / Buck Henry's mother's mimicry

film lobby poster (1928)
Motion Picture Magazine, March-July 1918—

[As leading-lady in Jack Spurlock—Prodigal, Hollywood actress Ruth Taylor (1905-1984), star of the original version of Gentleman Prefer Blondes, and mother of comedian Buck Henry] had to eat an onion in one of the scenes, and she begged Director Carl Harbaugh to camouflage a turnip instead. But a "retake" was necessary, and as there had been only one turnip provided, she was obliged to eat an onion. She canceled a dinner engagement for the evening. Now they have a supply of camouflage onions at the Fox studio.

RELATED LINKS

Saturday, December 13, 2025

Sir Walter Raleigh makes use of smoke as camouflage

W. Allen Howells, Raleigh Blowing Smoke
Philip Leslie Hale, in his column titled As the World Wags in The Boston Herald on January 24, 1918—

In the definition of "camouflage" the standard French dictionaries are of little or no use. Littre gives "camouflet," the noun, meaning “a thick smoke that one blows maliciously into the nose of one with a lighted paper cone." To give a "camouflet" is to affront, mortify a person. "Camouflet" is also a mining term. This French word is an old one. It is defined in Cotgrave’s dictionary (1678) as "a snuft or cold pie, a smoakie paper held under the nose of a slug or sleeper." Now, a cold pie in old colloquial English meant an application of cold water to wake a sleeper. “To give cold pig" was another form, and it is still used. In dialect a "cold pie” is an accident to a train or carriage in a pit, a fall on the ice, a disappointment of any kind.

In more modern French-English dictionaries, a camouflet is a whift of smoke in the face; a stifler; an affront, rap over the knuckles, snub.

•••

Adrian Margaux, If Our Caricaturists Had Flourished Before: Some of the Drawings They May Have Made, in the Strand Magazine, November 1918, pp. 365-366—

W. Allen Howells, British illustrator. when asked to choose a subject for a comic portrait—"…I should like to [illustrate] Sir Walter Raleigh, as I have an idea he was one of the pioneers of camouflage in this country. A French slang dictionary tells me that the word means blowing smoke through a paper cone into another person's face as an insult, and I can imagine Sir Walter making use of the device between his draws of tobacco smoke."

RELATED LINKS

Monday, November 24, 2025

will shoe makers soon decree that shoes be dissimilar

Above Giacomo Balla, Sketches for Futurist clothing (1914). See Caroline Galambosova, How Italian Futurism Influenced Fashion (2025).

•••

Anon, SHOES DIFFER IN COLOR from The Davenport Democrat and Leader (Davenport IA) on March 1, 1925, p. 3—

Futurism, cubism or some other art complex has descended upon French custom boot makers, who insist that they set the styles in women's shoes for the world. These boot makers all are of one mind in turning out symmetrical footwear. The first models of this year styles were shown, a few weeks ago. They seemed freakish, but the boot makers have carried their original ideas further until now one side of a shoe Is quite different, not only in design, but in color, from the other side. Humorists are speculating whether the makers will not soon decree that right and left shoes be entirely dissimilar.

RELATED LINKS

Sunday, November 23, 2025

how to be a futurist —and the birth of modernist snow

Above A British satirical cartoon about Futurism, published in 1912, one year in advance of the American Armory Show (first US exhibit of Modern Art), and two years before the formation (by the French Army) of a wartime camouflage section. Disruptive camouflage would thereafter be commonly said to have come from Futurism, Cubism and Vorticism.

•••

Anon, THE SNOWSCAPE: Revelation of Modern Art Not Futurism, Cubism or Other Cosmic Urge, but Phase of Nature, reprinted from the New York Herald in St. Joseph News-Press on January 8, 1923—

The great revelation of modern art is not futurism, cubism, vorticism, or any other of the Freudian cosmic urges. Movements of that sort most always belong strictly to the self-elected heirs of an impredicable posterity.

The revelation of modern art is snow. From the brilliant palette of today a new mantle of pleasure has fallen upon the consciousness of cultivated perception lighter and more lovely than the past ever dreamed.

Snow to the Greeks and Romans was merely something cool to put in a beverage. Among the Italian primitives and through the Renaissance snow scarcely existed save on some background mountain top. Here and there a later Dutchman accepted it as a necessary adjunct to a winter genre. But for the most part art excluded it through a convention almost as rigid as that by which the Japanese printmakers ignored shadows.

The Japanese, of course, loved snow and filled their designs with It. But it was never more than spacing or applied white lead. And the snow blindness of Western art persisted far into the last century. Imagine a snow scene by Corot. Some men, perhaps, were attempting it, especially religious painters, who required it to chill their lost sheep, but only in the Christmas card kind of way until Sisley discovered that Paris streets became in winter an opalescent wonder.

And that is precisely the vital modern discovery—that snow is not white. Faint rose, azure, orchid, lavender, primrose, pearl, or any possible combination in the higher keys it may be, but blank white, never! The sky Itself is not more varied or richer in hue or texture. No one who has ever studied a Redfield, for example. or one of the Swedish, can continue to think of the winter landscape as a dull white sheet of other than a prismatic Persian carpet replete with glorious astonishments.

Modern art has excelled in this alone. Snow is probably the only phase of nature that is being painted better and more sympathetically today than ever before. And because the artist is an interpreter who walks only a few feet ahead of his generation thousands upon thousands of us will look from our windows this winter upon a shimmering rainbow tinted world our fathers never knew.

RELATED LINKS

is that a woman shampooing her cornfield?—say what!

Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette's Letter from London, "River Reflections" in THE SKETCH, June 5, 1918, p. 276—

[I am reminded of] a little true yarn which of course is not apropos (oh, not at all!) but which may make you grin. It is a tale of one of yous, a pre-war painter, a famous one of the future. When war broke out he left his velvet coat for khaki, and went off whistling. He got wounded and was sent back home to a wife who objected to his pipe, and would tidy his studio and took unto herself the right to choose his models! He stood it for a little while, after which he tried to get back into the Army. The doctors, however, would not pass him for active service. A friend in authority advised him to apply for camouflage work, and obligingly took a few of his canvases to show the Red-Capped-One who Decideth one of the Futurist masterpieces.

"Humph, call that painting? What is it, anyway?"

"A woman shampooing her hair, Sir."

"Hair, is it? Looks more like a cornfield to me."

"Well, Sir, isn't that camouflage?"

And the Futurist one was fortunate, and is now camouflaging unflaggingly.

RELATED LINKS

Friday, November 21, 2025

Dan Campion / camouflage, surrealism and satiric wit

Dan Campion, The Mirror Test

At a recent book reading, I was fortunate to meet an Iowa City-based writer named Dan Campion. We had an interesting conversation, and he kindly shared a copy of his recent book of poetry, The Mirror Test (MadHat Press, 2024).

As an artist and designer, I was immediately drawn to the cover (shown here, designed by Marc Vincenz, using an image credited to Vincenz, Jake Quart and Sonia Santos), which—like the poetry it illustrates—works by a finely hewn balancing act between clarity and confusion.

Ambiguity at its finest pervades Dan Campion's wonderful poems. I myself, as an addict of clarion vision, as well as its famous subversion in the varieties of camouflage, stopped abruptly in his book at Blaze Orange, a quietly elegant comment about the irony of vision, its enablement, yet also its prevention. Here is the complete text of that poem, reprinted with the permission of its author (copyright © Dan Campion)—

Blaze orange, the opposite of camouflage,

creates a bold, conspicuous mirage

of safety, as if iridescence could

not stain with hemoglobin red nor would

it disappear completely under snow

that rushes down with vicious undertow

nor fail to stop or slow a motorist

who'll flat refuse the breathalyzer test.

We bought my blaze orange T-shirt late one year

to spare me being taken for a deer

while walking through the woods. It's comical.

But even so, at least once every fall

I pull it from the bottom of the drawer

and put it on and venture out, secure.

Only recently, maybe ten days before I met Dan Campion, I had given a talk for a conservation group, about animal camouflage, in which one of the slides I showed was that of blaze orange hunter's garb. As for Dan Campion himself, I didn't recognize the name. Only later did I realize that in fact he was the author of a book I so enjoyed, years ago, about the humorous writings of Peter De Vries (1910-1993), titled Peter De Vries and Surrealism, a must read.

RELATED LINKS

Tuesday, November 11, 2025

whyah duck decoy, whyah no chicken hunting cartoon

Above This is the cover of the October 20, 1909, issue of Puck, an American humor magazine that was founded in 1875 and continued until 1918. This cartoon was published about five years prior to the official adoption (by the French Army) of the practice of wartime camouflage. So although it doesn't use the word, it is nevertheless a portrayal of camouflage, such as the employment of decoys.

In the cartoon, two hunters armed with shotguns (labeled on their clothing as "Political Boss" and "Public Service Corporation") are concealed in the reeds on the edge of a lake, waiting for birds overhead to alight. On the water in front of them are various bird decoys, labeled "Respectable Candidates," with which they hope to lure the flocks of birds (labeled "Votes") to land. The text below the cartoon reads "They know the kinds of decoys to use."

Also see Abbott H. Thayer's Vanishing Ducks: Surveillance, Art and Camouflage.

Saturday, August 30, 2025

Glen Gano / US actor, cinematographer, camoufleur

Actor and Hollywood cameraman Glen Gano (1892-1973), born in Kokomo IN, was the cinematographer for four Three Stooges productions: Booby Dupes, Micro-Phonies, Idiots Dulux, and The Yoke’s on Me. But, prior to that, he was also a US Army camoufleur. On January 11, 1918, the Corvallis [OR] Gazette Times included an article titled CAMOUFLAGERS DUE FOR FRANCE VISIT HERE BEFORE DEPARTURE.

Gano, according to the article, “came here from Camp American University [Washington DC] with John F. Byrne… Both soldiers beong to a camouflage corps, Company F of the Twenty-fourth Engineers, who are about to go to France. Private Byrne is a former Carnegie Institute of Technology student and last night entertained [students from that school] at his home…

Showing that psychologists are at work in assigning young men to the positions they are best fitted, Private Byrne…being a [scene] decorator, was assigned to camouflage.

For a wholly different reason, Mr. Gano, who enlisted at Los Angeles, was detailed for camouflage because he was familiar with outdoor photograpy, and was competent to arrange scenes which might easily deceive the German and Austrian expert scouts in the air.

Mr. Gano, in speaking of the reasons impelling him to enlist, said that war could not be more hazardous than going over cliffs in automobiles, lassoing moving locomotives and the like [as he has done as an actor in Hollywood films]. “As a class we want to show the nation that screen actors have more enduring qualities than curly locks, and ‘looking pretty’ in close-ups,” Mr. Gano said.

According to Wikipedia: “On December 6, 1915, during the filming of an episode of the serial The Hazards of Helen, Gano, reportedly acting as a stunt double for the film's star, suffered what, over the next few days, would be described variously as ‘a fatal fall,’ ‘tragic death,’ ‘injuries from which he will probably die,’ (aka ‘probably fatal injuries’), making an ill-fated leap from the 4th Street Bridge in Los Angeles. Thankfully, reports of his demise proved premature.”

RELATED LINKS

Saturday, August 16, 2025

blue paint hard to clean up / never camouflaged again

Tree Branches Used as Camouflage during WWI

TOLD HARRY LAUDER HOW HIS SON DIED in Lewiston Evening Journal (Lewiston ME), December 30, 1918—

“Ever do any camouflage work?” was asked him [Harry Barton, Canadian scenic designer who served in the Canadian Flying Corps during World War I, and as a scenery painter for the Luttringer Stock Company in Lewiston).

“Once,” said he, and again that wide smile flitted over his face. He dabbled a bit of brown onto the sketch he was making, and added a bit of high light here and there. “Only once. An officer called me over one day. ‘You have been a scenic artist, haven’t you, Barton?” he asked me. “Yes sir,” I said. “Then take that canvas and let’s see what you can do to cover that gun over there.” He got his little folding camp chair and sat down to watch me camouflage the gun. I arranged the canvas and the scaffold to work from. I didn’t care for the job. I had about all the work I wanted flying. He followed me about with his little chair. Finally I was working right over his head, and some way a can of ultramarine blue got overturned right on top of him. He was the bluest officer you ever saw, he was blue for days. It is a hard color to get rid of. Strangely enough, I was never called upon again for camouflage work.

RELATED LINKS

Norman Wilkinson / UK dazzle camoufleur lives again

British artist / camoufleur Norman Wilkinson

Now here’s an odd discovery: The British artist Norman Wilkinson (we've blogged about him numerous times) is credited as the innovator of what is now commonly known as “dazzle painting,” the use of disruptive geometric designs during World War I for ship camouflage. His usual biographical dates are 1878-1971. Shown above is a portrait photograph from 1911 (restored and AI colorized), in advance of the war, at which time he was working for the Illustrated London News.

Here’s the oddity: On February 16, 1934, an article in the Glasgow Herald stated that—

Mr. Norman Wilkinson, the well-known scenic and poster artist, who died yesterday at his home in London, is perhaps best remembered as the inventor of naval camouflage during the war. For the sake of distinction, it was called “dazzle” painting, and its object was to so distort the normal appearance of a vessel that her actual course became a matter of doubt to an enemy submarine officer intending to torpedo the ship. Earlier forms of camouflage had proved much less successful than “dazzle” painting.…

That announcement of course does not comply with later accounts of Wilkinson’s life, which state that he died in 1971. Fortunately, in a subsequent issue (February 23), the Glasgow Herald said this instead—

We very much regret that in our issue of February 16 we published a paragraph announcing the death in London of Mr. Norman Wilkinson, “the scenic artist,” and remembering the versatility of the celebrated inventor of marine camouflage we assumed from the brief notice of information that it was he who had died. We therefore offer full apology to Mr.Wilkinson for the erroneous report unwittingly circulated and for the confusion and embarrassment inseparable from the addition of his name to the now considerable list of distinguished men who have lived to read their own obituary notices.

Wilkinson, Dazzle Scheme Components (c1917)

RELATED LINKS

Saturday, July 12, 2025

I can transform anyone into whatever they want to be

Above Cartoon by W.K. Haselden in The Daily Mirror, January 14, 1918.

•••

EDITH HEAD (Hollywood costume designer), as interviewed in The Daily Mirror, November 2, 1970—

Well, I can go back to Mae West or right forward to Paul Newman. I was the first one to put clothes on Mae.

I remember she said to me: “Fit it tight, honey, I want them all to know I’m a girl from every angle.” But it didn’t work with Anita Eckberg.

There was so much of her that kept falling out.

I’m a camouflager. I can transform anyone into anything they want to be.…

•••

camouflage research site map

RELATED LINKS

Monday, June 30, 2025

dazzle camouflaged ship used as advertising space

Above FUNNY BUSINESS cartoon with caption “I think the camouflager sold some advertising space!” by Ralph A. Hershberger, in The Pittsburgh Press, July 23, 1945.

•••

Raymond A. Tolbert, HOBART MAN WRITES OF OCEAN VOYAGE: Young Attorney Enroute to Front as YMCA Secretary Tells His Experiences, in The Times-Democrat (Altus OK), January 17, 1918—

Yesterday we received quite a thrill when a ship passed us in the distance. I looked at it through a kindly Frenchman’s binoculars but it looked more like a zebra than anything else, it was so camouflaged. The art of the camouflager is quite unique. As we left the harbor. we passed a large number of ships spotted and daubed up in much the same way that a small boy paints a barn.

RELATED LINKS

Sale-priced books on camouflage / free shipping

Sunday, June 22, 2025

women are expert camoufleurs / it is their middle name

Cartoon, Fay King 1918
CAMOUFLAGE IS MIDDLE NAME OF WOMAN: EXPERIENCED IN KEEPING WILLIE ‘HALF-FARE’: IF SHE CAN PAINT RED CRAWFISH ON PLATTERS, CLOUDS WOULD COME EASY

by Fay King, San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1918

In my humble opinion, if there is one branch of the service that we women oughta excell in it’s CAMOUFLAGE.

If I had my way I’d give every woman a job in the camouflage department, and is she’s over forty she’s a master of the art.

Figure it out for yourself. A perfect forty-eight has been looking like a perfect thirty-six for centuries.

Give any woman three days’ notice and a good dressmaker and she can be hippy or hippless, according to fashion’s decree. She can look like Mrs. Vernon Castle or Maxine Elliott or whoever happens to be the most copied at the time, even if she has a face as hilly as San Francisco.

The wife of a small salaried man has long camouflaged as the wife of a steel magnate.

She can make a table full of dishes look like a square meal. Can you imagine what a cinch she’d have making a battleship look like a bucket?

Camouflage is woman’s middle name—why not make it her “bit”?

SURELY her experience at keeping Willie looking like a half-fare is proof enough of her success.

A lip stick and a powder puff have won many a husband for a clever woman. She could certainly win a war with a barrel of paint and a ton of powder.

She’s been painting red crawfish so long on platters and buttercups on butter dishes, she’d not have the slightest difficulty in designing storm clouds on ship masts, waves on battle-boats and daisies on the nose of a cannon.

RELATED LINKS

Sale-priced books on camouflage / free shipping

WWI swimsuit camouflage / latest fashion clothing fad

RELATED LINKS

Sale-priced books on camouflage / free shipping

Thursday, June 25, 2026

Friday, April 3, 2026

Tuesday, January 6, 2026

Sunday, December 28, 2025

Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

Sunday, December 14, 2025

Saturday, December 13, 2025

Monday, November 24, 2025

Sunday, November 23, 2025

Friday, November 21, 2025

Tuesday, November 11, 2025

Saturday, August 30, 2025

Saturday, August 16, 2025

Saturday, July 12, 2025

Monday, June 30, 2025

Sunday, June 22, 2025

ONLINE PRODUCTS LINKS

NEW ONLINE VIDEO TALKS

New Full Text Releases

Related Links

Books

Online Research

About Me

Followers

Translate

Blog Archive

Labels