Time for Comedy

The most popular new exhibition in London last week was at the stodgy old Royal Society of Arts. Strictly for the hot weather, the society had assembled 162 cartoons and sketches, by 50 artists, chosen to reflect the British sense of humor. Princess Elizabeth, in cool green and white, gave the show a royal launching with a tour of inspection that covered a century and a half of evidence.

Among the more conspicuous exhibits on the walls of the society's sedate Georgian library were the rowdy etchings of James Gillray; he and his bibulous contemporary Thomas Rowlandson had fathered English cartooning. Working above Mistress Humphrey's print shop in Piccadilly where his etchings sold for 18 pence, Gillray had scorched the court of George III with his acid portrayals of spendthrift profligates and pompous politicians. Rowlandson's needle-sharp stylus had deflated many a Regency swell and belle.

Gentler and more elegant were the satires of such famed Victorian humorists as George du Maurier and Sir John Tenniel. Their Punch drawings of crinolined damsels and young men in cutaways had quietly chided a more prosperous and conservative age.

Beside these artists, the 20th Century cartoonists whose work made up a good three fourths of the show often seemed little more than hurried illustrators of passing quips. Yet the best of them, typified by Punch's present Editor Cyril K. Bird (portraits of England's beleaguered middle class) and the Evening Standard's bumptious David Low, showed the old English bite and a talent for good-natured selfcriticism, albeit streamlined.

Most spectators, including Princess Elizabeth, got their biggest chuckles from Rube Goldbergish efforts like W. Heath Robinson's Magnetic Method of Stretching Spaghetti (at the expense of Britain's face-lengthening austerity program) and H. M. Bateman's Tragedy at Wellington Barracks, a study in horror-struck faces as a butter-fingered guardsman on parade drops his rifle. It was dapper Australian-born Cartoonist Bateman who had started the whole thing in a speech to the Royal Society last February, declaring it was high time the British had a "National Academy of Humorous Art." Last week's show was a sort of test run.

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