Attempted Bloggery: Thoughts of the Sportsman: Charles Addams and Lee Lorenz

Friday, January 29, 2021

Thoughts of the Sportsman: Charles Addams and Lee Lorenz

An original Charles Addams bowling cartoon from 1962 was sold yesterday at Swann Auction Galleries in New York. The New Yorker drawing gives us an unusual insight into the thoughts of the bowler. Is the cartoon misogynistic? The humorously-depicted thought balloon might suggest that to many of us today. Overall, though, the cartoonist's oeuvre shows Addams to be more or less evenhanded in how he doles out fantasies of implied bodily harm between the sexes.

Just two years later, again in the pages of The New Yorker, another cartoonist, Lee Lorenz, addresses a very similar theme, this time on the golf course. We don't get to see the golfing man's thoughts here, but we do get to hear his wife's suspicion of what they might be. The New Yorker rough was also offered in the sale yesterday at Swann Galleries. It would have made a fine addition to just about any cartoon collection, but it went unsold.