Three cartoonists walk into a bar and they each stagger out at closing time with a great idea for a gag. Their names are Bruce Petty, Ronald Searle, and John O'Brien, and in each cartoonist's case the gag is basically the same visual idea. They live on different continents so, in all fairness, it's unlikely they were in the same bar. And, to be sure, they compose their gags during different decades, but they all choose to submit them to the same magazine. That magazine is, of course, the New Yorker, the world's most prestigious publisher of gag cartoons.
So far, nothing really unusual has happened. Far-flung cartoonists come up with nearly identical gags all the time. What is unusual is that the New Yorker, one of the best-edited magazines on the planet, the possessor of a legendary fact-checking department which even checks the cartoons, goes ahead and actually publishes two of these very similar cartoons. In addition, they are currently, through the Cartoon Bank, licensing the rights to the third, unpublished drawing. How exactly could such a thing happen?
First off, let me state that I am not writing about plagiarism, which is a deliberate act of appropriating someone else's work as your own. I am writing about three celebrated cartoonists in the highest echelon of their craft going through the creative process and arriving at basically the same gag. It is more common than you might think. In fact, it is pretty much inevitable. No, what's really odd here, I think, is the publication history.
Exhibit A is a page from the New Yorker issue of August 7, 1965. It contains a single-panel cartoon with no caption by the talented Australian cartoonist Bruce Petty:
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Bruce Petty
The New Yorker, August 7, 1965, Page 28 |
Bruce Petty
The New Yorker, August 7, 1965, Page 28
It's closing time in the bar, one or two in the morning according to the clock, and the very disgruntled proprietor has had to take matters into his own hands with a patron who refuses to finish his last drink and leave. This preposterous situation is executed deftly by Petty, who renders the entire seat arrangement quite plausibly with the help of all those simple but well-placed vertical lines. The broad use of wash saturates the interior space in darkness, rendering the barkeep's exhausted frustration palpable.
Bruce Petty's cartoon did not totally fade into obscurity as do so many cartoons even after appearing in the New Yorker. It was eventually collected in John Bailey's Great Cartoons of the World, Series Four (Crown, 1970). The signature was moved, possibly to accommodate a page crease, and something funny happened with the shading at the very top and bottom of the picture, but it's clearly the same drawing and it's attributed correctly to the artist and the magazine. That's where our story might have ended, but it doesn't.
Let's fast forward to 1973 and take a look at Exhibit B, the bold cover art by Ronald Searle. The issue is dated March 31, but I don't think it's meant to be an April Fools joke.
Ronald Searle
The New Yorker, March 31, 1973
Searle's approach is far more detailed and exacting but, of note, the upended patron sits in almost exactly the same position as Petty's. Searle does not show us the proprietor, leaving us to deduce how this bar patron ended up in his present predicament. He does not indicate the time of day by color, by shading or by a clock, but rather solely by the overnight arrangement of the chairs. In fact, the white upper third of the composition renders the scene unusually bright, which is very different from Petty's conception. Searle's floor tiles are arranged in a dizzying background pattern allowing us to share in the bar patron's vertigo. The man's status as last patron in the bar is further underscored by the hat rack with its lone remaining fedora.
Petty's 1965 gag is inspired, a rendering of a totally plausible conflict with an absurdly funny outcome. Searle's 1973 cover is perhaps even more absurd, as it is conceived at a later moment than Petty's, when the inebriated soul is left alone and isolated in his logical yet physically-impossible situation. In addition, Searle's watercolor is a compositional tour-de-force, rendering it suitable for The New Yorker's cover.
Wait, this gets even stranger. You might reasonably assume that Searle, living in France, was unaware of the work of Petty, living in Australia. It turns out that Searle was not only aware of Petty, he wrote the introduction to a collection of the younger artist's serious work, drawings that recall Searle's own example of reportage collected in, for example, Refugees 1960:
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Bruce Petty Australian Artist in South East Asia. Melbourne: Grayflower, 1962:
With an introduction by Ronald Searle
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Small world, no? It's a good thing I don't believe in conspiracy theories or I might suggest that the two artists could have colluded to publish similar gags in the magazine. But I don't, so I won't. Might Searle have seen Petty's cartoon somewhere, forgotten it, and then inadvertently copied it? It's certainly possible. But that still doesn't explain how essentially the same gag got accepted and published twice in The New Yorker.
Here's what I believe may have happened on The New Yorker's end, but it's only a conjecture. As described in Lee Lorenz's The Art of the New Yorker 1925-1995, art editor James Geraghty announced his retirement in 1972. After some time, Lorenz was chosen to be his successor, and there was a three month transitional period in which he, Lorenz, worked with Geraghty while the older man reported on his protege's progress to editor William Shawn. Lorenz took over at some point in 1973 and so it's just possible that Geraghty never saw the Searle cover that was run in late March. Lorenz may not have been familiar with the Petty drawing, and perhaps Shawn and others had forgotten it as well. Anyway, my unsubstantiated guess is that this cover was accepted and published as a result of the transition in the art department.
Our story is not yet ended though. Exhibit C is on the Cartoon Bank's website. It's a drawing by John O'Brien that was never published in The New Yorker. There are relatively few unpublished drawings by New Yorker artists on the website available for licensing, and this is one of them. Perhaps many more are planned.
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John O'Brien "Finish up! We're closing."
Penthouse, c. 1999-2003
Image modified November 8, 2012
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O'Brien's bar patron is sitting at the bar, not at a table, and he has been upended without a chair, thereby distinguishing his drawing from the other two examples. Also, there is a word balloon with "Finish up! We're closing," which to my ear sounds a little superfluous, especially after the two previous wordless gags.
In conclusion, this visual gag seems to have unusual staying power over at the New Yorker, where the editorial staff apparently closed a lot of bars. Petty's gag for some reason is not listed on the Cartoon Bank's website, which seems a significant slight since he started all this. Searle clearly got the most mileage out of the idea, getting published on the prized cover of the magazine. O'Brien got to the party last and his cartoon was not published at all in The New Yorker, but he still gets to license his version of the gag with the Cartoon Bank, which could be lucrative in a small way. If nothing else, this unusually recurrent gag shows us how three superb cartoonists can approach the same subject just a bit differently, each, so to speak, bringing his own bottle to the table at closing time.
By the way, if anyone should have any additional information on the history of these three related cartoons, or possibly other examples of similar cartoons, please do let me know.
Ronald Searle
The Last Customer,
Original cover artwork
The New Yorker, March 31, 1973
Ronald Searle in Perspective. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1983, p. 143.
October 31, 2011 Update: The Cartoon Bank's website suddenly has disappeared and a new but dissimilar Condé Nast website has taken its place. The content has changed in unpredictable ways. I am no longer able to find the unpublished John O'Brien closing time drawing on this site . . . 
