Is this referencing Freudian psychology or something? What’s the historical context for this?
I think this is without much subtext. He’s not a psychiatrist: he’s a medical doctor. Thurber really is saying that doctors prey on helpless women.
Apparently the only reason that he’s standing on a chair is that Thurber made his legs too short and they didn’t want the doctor floating in mid-air.
Nah: he’s just saying that this one particular quack does.
Maybe something to do with the case of Letty Whitehall, involving a Dentist, Dr Dobbs, being arrested and standing trial for her murder?
She’d be better off with Mrs. Sprague’s rabbit - I mean, doctor.
I think most of Thurber’s cartoons are weird and inexplicable.
I think that’s unlikely. The Whitehall case was in 1926 and the cartoon didn’t appear until the Jan. 12, 1935 New Yorker.
Look at the doctor’s mouth-- It looks like he was trying to give him particularly nasty teeth, like some sort of carnivorous monster.
Reminds me of the song off Joe Jackson’s jump blues album, Jumpin’ Jive: You’re my Meat
Lyrics here: http://www.metrolyrics.com/youre-my-meat-lyrics-joe-jackson.html
So it would seem that was a hep-daddy bit of slang back in the day…
I think that “you’re my meat” translates into “you’re my main squeeze.” And that black thing is a mustache. And is there something having to do with “Dobbs” and “Quist”?
Some dictionaries include “a person regarded as a sexual object” as one of the definitions of “meat”:
So he’s got the hots for her, even though she’s someone else’s wife. The play on words is between “my patient” vs. “my meat.” Marginally funny, only considering the social mores of the period.’