American Folk Art, Office Division

Flipping through some old important paperwork in one of the 127 boxes of same that line the basement, I came upon a couple of those 1980's Xeroxed-and-passed-around cartoons that were so doggone popular in the 1980's.

The modern office copier, or Xerox, as they are all called, no matter what brand they are, and no matter how loudly the Konica Minolta guy complains, had only been around since 1960. I don't know what they used in the 1950's to pass around jokes, saucy sayings about bosses, and "witty" aphorisms. (Notice in this example, made in the pre-PC days with some sort of rub-on lettering system, how it has been photocopied so many times it's all crooked. And after 25+ years, still not funny or even trenchant.) Maybe they just worked instead in those days.

Nowadays in these days, everyone has their office PC, which provides a place to rest their smartphone, where they spend the day on Facebook or whatever. Stuff is professionally produced on all sorts of computer programs, and then disseminated to hundreds of people in the wink of an eye. In this manner, hundreds of rubes per hour are duped into believing that Barack H. Obama was born in Kenya and has no business being president.

Perhaps we were better off with homemade drawings showing people sitting in outhouses or xeroxed copies of people's backsides. Hey, that sort of humor might come back!