Thursday, February 14, 2019

Valentine: What a Waste of a Lovely Night

It seems to be an obvious truth that more dating couples are wrong for each other than are right for each other, but people keep doggedly trying to find the right partner for themselves anyway. So much has changed between the publication of Ben Roth's cartoon in the June 1937 Judge and the release of Damien Chazelle's film "La La Land" in 2016, but the challenges of compatibility and of somehow finding love have not. Thus we have nearly the same sentiment being expressed in two very different media some eight decades apart. Sometimes the mood is right but the match is just wrong. Or…is it?


"Boy, could this be a romantic night, if we weren't stuck with each other."
Ben Roth
Judge, June 1937

Scan by Dick Buchanan



"A Lovely Night"
from "La La Land" (2016)
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone
Music by Justin Hurwitz
Written and Directed by Damien Chazelle




Note:  If a cartoon is worth seeing once,chances are it's worth revisiting. The above Ben Roth cartoon which still captivates me was scanned by Dick Buchanan and included a year and a half ago in a sumptuous post on Mike Lynch Cartoons entitled "From the Dick Buchanan Files: Magazine Cartoons from Life and Judge 1931 - 38." Dick writes of the cartoonist, "Ben Roth was the eldest of the four cartooning Roth brothers." Dick maintains the invaluable Dick Buchanan Cartoon Clip Files from which he contributes regularly to Mike Lynch Cartoons, most recently a post entitled "From the Dick Buchanan Files: More Vintage Gag Cartoons 1947 - 1962." You could do worse.



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