You may think that I spend all day chuckling to myself as I catalogue the Carl Giles collection. If only this was true. The problem is that I don’t find his ‘gag’s funny. Because he worked to a tight schedule and had to prepare a cartoon the day before it was published, he relied on topical events to provide source material. This meant reading the newspapers every morning and producing a cartoon for the Daily Express or Sunday Express by late afternoon so it could be sent by train from his studio in Ipswich to London in time for printing. As a result some of the jokes are a bit laboured and don’t last. The caption was often changed by the Editor as well, which probably made it even less funny.
I realise that this is sacrilege for all you Giles fans out there, but bear with me. What I do find funny are the situations and things going on in the background. His cartoons often appear to be one frame of a film, where something has just happened and something else is going to happen immediately afterwards. This is not surprising when you consider that Giles worked as an animator before becoming a cartoonist. Ignore the caption and take some time to study the details – the children misbehaving, Butch the dog watching as the baby is dropped into Mum’s tights on the washing line, a bird pecking at Grandma’s head as she sleeps in the chair. Have a look at the Giles Annual covers that don’t rely on captions to explain the humour.
Giles liked placing things in the background to see if people noticed – especially the legal team at the Express, which had to check the artwork to make sure that there weren’t any packets of condoms falling out of an American serviceman’s pockets. There is also one cartoon where a guardsman marching up and down on the parade ground has a slight disadvantage – he has no head or torso, you just see the legs. Giles may have forgotten to finish him because he was rushing to meet a deadline, but it was reproduced in the annual. I’ll leave you to find that one.
