It’s hardly a secret, but Syd Hoff, whose New Yorker cartoons and kiddy books (Danny and the Dinosaur) flourished for decades, also had a parallel career as “A. Redfield,” a Bolshie cartoonist for the Daily Worker and New Masses.
Most of A. Redfield’s stuff wasn’t very funny, but occasionally . . . it was. The trick seems to have been to ape Peter Arno rather than be stridently commie.
The better Hoff cartoons, for Collier’s, College Humor, and many other rags besides The New Yorker, tended to be full-page and fully realized (like Arno’s), even colored. They’re usually not terribly funny but, again . . . sometimes they are. Seldom however do they approach this level of black humor (right).
More commonly they’re cute, mawkish, haimisch. A lot of them portray Jews out of Clifford Odets. Hoff would pick generic Jewish names, never bothering about whether a real Bernard Levin out there would imagine it was about him:
Fully half of his simple gags involve conjugal matters, often with a most unlikely, middle-aged, overweight couple. This sort of marital friskiness may take place in the parlor or the kitchen . . . but never the bedroom:
Bitter about being overshadowed by his African-American superiors in the Down Beat magazine critic’s poll, Kenton sent the editors a now-notorious telegram, grousing of his status in “a new minority, white jazz musicians.” He was something less than sensitive— personally as well as professionally, according to his daughter Leslie Kenton, who, in a memoir published last year, detailed what she described as an incestuous relationship with her father. One need not be concerned with that controversy to see the problem with Stan Kenton. Kenton’s music was monstrous enough.
