Judge
A flourishing weekly American humor magazine for close to sixty years, Judge was renowned during the 1920s for bringing a newgeneration of sophisticated humor writers and cartoonists to the attention of American readers, including S. J. Perelman, Theodor Seuss Geisel ("Dr. Seuss"), Ralph Barton, Johnny Gruelle, Ernie Bushmiller, and Harold Ross.
Judge was founded in New York City in 1881 and survived until 1939 in its initial run, offering a mix of jokes, short humor pieces, reviews, and gag cartoons. The humor magazines of the nineteenth century, unlike late twentieth-century publications such as Mad and Cracked, were aimed at grown-up readers and included topical and political observations as well as broad comedy and ethnic jokes. Judge was founded just five years after the appearance of one of its chief competitors, Puck, which, as one historian has pointed out, soon "shed its crude image—with jokes about minorities, slapstick humor, and puns—and became a sophisticated humor magazine with longer articles and more society and suburban subjects." Similar to Puck in form and content, Judge also owed something to Britain's well-established Punch. A key figure in the early development of Judge was cartoonist James Albert Wales, who left Puck to put together the group that launched the new magazine.
The next major humor weekly to come along was Life, which debuted in 1883. Puck folded in 1918, but Judge and Life remained rivals well into the 1930s. Though never quite as slick or sophisticated as Life, Judge managed to hold its own against its competitor, and by 1925 proclaimed "Larger circulation than any other humorous weekly in the world" on its covers. The man credited with boosting Judge's circulation over 100,000 was Norman Anthony, who became editor in 1923. He promoted the single-caption cartoon—as opposed to the traditional he-she type of earlier years-and with coming up with theme issues devoted to a specific topic, such as the Advertising Number, Celebrities Number, Radio Number, and College Number. Among the new contributors Anthony recruited for these issues were S. J. Perelman, "Dr. Seuss," and cartoonist Jefferson Machamer. Initially a cartoonist as well as a writer, Perelman contributed somewhat surreal cartoons as well as humor pieces and magazine parodies; his cartoons were always accompanied by a block of copy in the style that would later show up in his New Yorker pieces and in the nonsense dialogue he contributed to the Marx Brothers movies. Harold Ross, who later founded the The New Yorker, worked for Anthony briefly, and other eventual New Yorker contributors, such as Chon Day, Charles Addams, Gardner Rea, and Whitney Darrow, Jr., all did work for Judge. Other contributors included Milt Gross, Don Herold, William Gropper, Bill Holman (creator of Smokey Stover), Vernon Grant, and Ernie Bushmiller (creator of Nancy). Judge's theater critic in the 1920s and early 1930s was the formidable George Jean Nathan, and movie reviews were provided by Pare Lorentz, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker.
Anthony was lured away to Life in 1929 and was replaced as editor by John Shuttleworth. In 1931, Anthony created Ballyhoo, a much more raucous magazine that satirized advertising and many other icons of popular culture. Life, a monthly by that time and trying unsuccessfully to mimic The New Yorker, ended its run in 1936, selling its title to Henry Luce for his new picture weekly. By this time, Judge itself was a monthly, and for a time ran a cover line: "Including the humorous tradition and features of Life. " The magazine held on until 1939 before folding; it was revived twice, but never regained its earlier popularity.
Further Reading:
Horn, Maurice, editor. The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons. New York, Chelsea House Publications, 1980.
Trachtenberg, Stanley, editor. American Humorists, 1800-1950. Detroit, Gale Research Company, 1982.
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