Lala Palooz

Lala Palooza

In 1934 Cartoonist Reuben Lucius Goldberg astounded the newspaper trade by suddenly abandoning the grotesquely exaggerated pictorial humor which had made him rich & famed. In place of the hilarious daily strip which the McNaught Syndicate was happily selling far & wide, "Rube" Goldberg offered a serious, human-interest character named Doc Wright, similar in tone but not in inspiration to Gasoline Alley's benign Walt Wallet. Within ten months, the solemn doings of Doc Wright were beginning to bore Artist Goldberg as much as they did many a reader. Though Doc Wright still appeared in more than zoo papers, independently wealthy Artist Goldberg quit drawing altogether, devoted full time to his writing instead.

Last year Cartoonist Goldberg was invited to leave his artistic retirement, continue the late Sidney Smith's Andy Gump for the New York News-Chicago Tribune syndicate. Comic Artist Goldberg was vexed at the idea of drawing another cartoonist's characters. Next thing the trade knew, Rube Goldberg was working up a new feature whose principal character, a fat female clown, was christened Lala Palooza after consultation with Yale's Pundit William Lyon Phelps. By last week, with 75 papers signed up* by a new syndicate headed by Frank Jay Markey, it was evident that editors expected from the new Goldbergian feature the old Goldbergian fun.

Rich and stupid Lala Palooza set out vigorously to please all lovers of oldtime funnypaper slapstick. She started her comic career by consulting Professor Zeero, a turbaned faker, who advised her to marry an impostor named Senor Gonzales. When Lala Palooza's lazy brother, Vincent Doolittle, opposed the match he was thrown through a door by Hives, his sister's supercilious chauffeur. Thrilled to her deep core, Lala Palooza accepted Gonzales and this week, in the course of reducing to please him, she blacks both Professor Zeero's eyes with a dumbbell, drops heavy weights on Brother Vincent.

All this excitement is displayed against the familiar Goldberg background of monstrous art & architecture. Like so many successful newspapermen, Rube Goldberg started in San Francisco. In 1907 he went to Manhattan, got a job illustrating sports for the Evening Mail. By chance he one day filled out his space with Foolish Question No. 1, which showed a man who had fallen from the Flatiron Building being asked by a bystander if he were hurt. Comeback: "No, I jump off this building every day to limber up for business." Thousands of subsequent Foolish Questions were published, followed by I'm the Guy, an equally celebrated series. Sometimes as sardonic as his cartooning idol, San Francisco's salty Thomas Aloysius ("Tad") Dorgan, Rube Goldberg fathered in his drawings such sayings as "It's a lot of baloney!" "Now that you've got it, what are you going to do with it?" and "They all look good when they're far away."

Most famed of all Goldbergiana are his lunatic inventions. These preposterous drawings were first inspired by memories of complicated scientific apparatus which Rube Goldberg, in his days as an engineering student at the University of California, was unable to take seriously. To demonstrate his mad machines, Goldberg invented Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts. Examples:

A Simple Bookmark, in which the operator by lifting his reading glasses releases a flock of moths who eat a woolen sock which drops a tear-gas bomb which causes a small dog to weep into a sponge whose added weight puts into operation a magic lantern which casts on the book's cover the likeness of a man who has stolen the wife of an angry dwarf who plunges a dagger through the picture and into the book, stopping when he strikes a pet flea who jumped between the pages to sleep when the book was laid down. The flea says "Ouch!" and kicks open the book at the right page.

A Device for Nominating a Candidate for High Office places a "fresh air fiend" next door to the candidate. When the windows are opened, the fresh air addict's pet owl catches cold and sneezes into a toy bugle which summons a company of National Guardsmen who think War is declared and, in their haste, upset a milkman and break his bottles, spilling milk which attracts hundreds of cats, whose howling wakes up the neighbors, whose own angry yells and howls the candidate mistakes for the voices of his constituents calling on him to save the country. The candidate thereupon jumps out of bed, throws up his window and launches into a speech of acceptance.

*Including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Detroit News, Louisville Courier-Journal, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Toronto Star.

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