No matter where I go with my New Yorker colleague (and spouse), Liza Donnelly, the spirit of James Thurber’s work somehow tags along with us. Last Sunday Ms. Donnelly and I went bowling with some family members — the first time in at least 20 years since we set foot (feet?) in a bowling alley. Seems not a whole lot’s changed at bowling lanes in all these years except the method of keeping score — it’s all on screen these days, with animation and information such as ball speed and suggestions for picking up the spare. Otherwise the experience remains fairly basic: check-in, rent shoes, find your lane, begin the quest for the correct ball weight, begin bowling.
It didn’t take long, following some gutterballs and finally, some pins dropping, and surveying the scene around us, for Ms. Donnelly and I to simultaneously bring up James Thurber’s fabulous 1935 New Yorker drawing bearing the caption:
“All right, all right, try it that way! Go ahead and try it that way!”
Looking at Thurber’s drawing, I really can’t imagine anyone capturing the scene any better.
His great bowling drawing first appeared in his must have book, Men, Women and Dogs, and later in another must-have, The Thurber Carnival.
A Little More About New Yorker Bowling Cartoons
I took a few moments to check out The New Yorker‘s Cartoon Bank inventory of bowling cartoons, and was pleasantly surprised to find quite a few. According to the results on the site, Charles Barsotti seems to have been most driven to draw bowling balls and pins (he has 5 out of the 30 or so cartoons shown). Zach Kanin is on his heels with 3. I was reminded I had one not too too long ago in The New Yorker (August 1, 2016).
Looking at it now, I can see– as is so often the case in my drawings — the Thurber influence. It’s especially obvious in the body language of these two bowlers.
