Chicago Spanking Review Special Series

The Humorama Spanking Cartoons!

#159 - Squeegee Spank

From Joker (February 1955). From the collection of and posted by the Web-Ed on 03/20/2015 (click to double-size). The artist is unknown.

O.K., let's admit at the outset that this offering is a rather weak entry into The Humorama Series. The gag as a gag is good enough - a window washer opens a window and runs his squeegee over the backside of the young woman showering inside - but it falls rather short as specifically spanking humor. Why? The main problem is the quality of the "spanking" - no OTK position, no bare hand, and not even a recognized implement. In fact, we hope no faithful CSR readers are thinking "Boy - the old Web-Ed's finally lost it. Guess doing all that research was finally too much for the poor guy."

No, we haven't lost our sanity - at least we haven't lost it lately - nor are we pouring out the last dregs of our cask of Humorama cartoons (we've got some better ones still to go). Sometimes we make the opposite call with a cartoon and relegate it to the Humorama Missed Opportunities topic over on the CSR Bulletin Board. But in this case, we felt sort of boxed in by our own definition of a spanking occurring when the hand or a hand-held implement is applied to the buttocks, and also by the fact that given its timing (early in 1955), this cartoon could well have been a sort of "trial run" to see if Abe Goodman (Humorama's editor at this time) and the general public were ready for a true spanking cartoon (by "true" we mean that the OTK position was used, taking us beyond the old Burlesque "Bend over, get a swat" routine). And so we've decided that despite its peculiarities, it is indeed a spanking cartoon the way Fresh Fish Spanking and Cutaway Fly Swatter Spanking (both from 1954) were, and yet we still consider the first "true" Humorama spanking cartoon to be the first Secretary Spanking where the OTK position was used for the first time.

The "spanking" part of this remains quite peculiar, although the window washer must have swung his squeegee forward in an arc giving the spankee a kind of swat. We don't know how to describe the squeegee-ing part of the "spanking" - we've never seen anything like it in a humor cartoon - but it is a kind of rude violation of the spankee like a swat or a pinch.

Some other things to notice about this cartoon:

1. The old-fashioned shower head.
2. The bare bottom - this was acceptable even a little before 1955 (in a cartoon), although significantly none of the OTK spankings during the "classic" period (1956-60) was ever on the bare.
3. The artist either left the cartoon unsigned or else his signature got cropped (this happened occasionally with Humorama), and we don't recognize the style.