Someone that hasn’t had to care for a lawn has just purchased everything necessary to do so.
The please sign is:
* for the grass to read so that it will grow properly after buying all the stuff
* for someone to come and take care of his yard since he doesn’t know how
* to sit next to the ‘Keep off the grass’ sign he has because he doesn’t want to annoy people
None seem a great fit to me….
His tropical shirt makes me wonder if he’s a former New Yorker that has lived in an apartment for his entire life, but has just retired to Florida and has no idea how lawns work and the store said this is what you need.
I don’t think it’s that complex, just a simple case of “New Yorker” understatement. If you see a sign saying just “Please.” on a freshly treated and trimmed lawn (especially with a sprinkler on it), it’s fairly clear that the intended meaning is “Please keep off the grass.”
P.S. I was wondering if there might be a hidden detail held in his hands, but apparently not. I was able to find the comic on the CD from “The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker” (May 2nd, 1953), but it is not available from the Conde Nast store, so the resolution shown above is the best we can hope for.
I think the guy with the truck is delivering the homeowner’s new yard maintenance stuff. The delivery apparently didn’t include the “please” sign.
Ironically, the homeowner is inquiring about the “polite” sign in a rude, accusatory way.
To start with I wanted to try looking at the picture and asking what the situation is, without yet taking into account the caption. I thought there are two main plausible readings. In the first, which Darren and then Pandemonium have both described, the guy with the truck has made a delivery of the gardening / lawn care tools and supplies, which the homeowner has purchased. But the other was actually what I first thought, that the guy with the truck is a gardener / lawn guy, and he is here for a service day at this homeowner’s lawn (or possibly the first); and he has just unloaded his own tools and some consumables he will be using. (The tools like lawnmower and grass roller will be packed back in the truck when he is done with the job.)
I think both of these are very plausible readings of just the drawing. But only the purchase-delivery scenario survives taking the dialogue into account. (not that we have really outlined a complete story enough to make the cartoon both understandable and funny.)
Any chance that yes it’s a delivery not a work-appointment with a gardener, and further the homeowner does not want to do the work himself so wants to hire a gardener service? And that’s what the Please sign will mean — “Please sign me up and put this yard on your lawn-care schedule.”
@ Pandemonium – I think you may have the answer! His facial expression certainly does seem “angry”, although it’s difficult to be sure with the limited resolution that we have to work with.
@ Downpuppy – The roller is a standard lawncare tool, but I cannot identify the square object. It’s too big for fertilizer, and way too small for sod.† There are wires around it that makes it look like a bale of hay. Perhaps he’s starting from pure dirt and wants to use hay to keep the seeds moist and protected from birds?
P.S. Small amounts of sod does sometimes come in squares, but I think 1953 predates the common use of sod for private yards.
Sod indeed used to come in squares. (Does it not still?) But I don’t recall it being packed in anything like that rectilinear crate at the back; just laid out on flats, which then were stacked with corner support but still looked mostly open.
The squares could be planted right up against each other for immediate full lawn coverage. But more likely you leave pretty big spaces between the plugs and expect it to grow into those spaces.
I’m not familiar with use of rollers for modest family-home yards in American towns or suburbs. I think of them for use in lawns that are supposed to be special and uniform / smooth; such as golf course greens, or televised British estates.
P.P.S. While (unsuccessfully) hunting for this comic in a higher resolution, I discovered that Rober Day did a wonderful parody of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Fallingwater“, which appeared almost exactly one year before the gardening comic:
I don’t know about 1953 but it was not much later that my family moved to a new subdivision in unincorporated s.w. Dade with a lot of new building and development. And we indeed initially had a small lawn that was sodded with widely-spaced squares on a grid. And it did grow in within a year. This was South Florida, so snow cover and lawn death over the winter were not issues.
Chak: Is a “crop” something that is intentionally grown, and therefore wanted? Of course some part of any crop will be mostly thrown away or plowed under, like straw from wheat or corn stalks. But I don’t know why you would grow wheat and then throw it all away. Here in New England, the largest crop is said to be rocks. Underground forces gradually push them up, so every spring you get a new crop of rocks you have to build walls with or otherwise dispose of.
Chak – if you consider lawn clippings as “harvested”, the answer might possibly be grass, but between mulching and composting, I’m not so sure it’s all thrown away. I’ve also heard that lawns are the largest irrigated crop in America.
Not to take anything away from Day’s “Fallingwater “ parody, but he missed a great opportunity to have the waterfall from each house cascading onto the one below a la those chocolate/Champaign fountains.
@ Lola – MikeD has the right answer, it is definitely “Open For Inspection“. My apologies for embedding a rendered preview above, I meant to include the full image:
P.S. The Conde Nast store offers a “zoom” into the native resolution used for prints.
Deety: Robert Frost’s materials for mending the wall were free for the taking with a practically unlimited supply. That’s why rock walls are everywhere in New England. Particularly in New Hampshire, “The Granite State.”
My English teacher was very insistent that Robert Frost did NOT say “Good fences make good neighbors.” It was the neighbor in the poem who said that, and it is not clear that Frost would agree. Sort of like Shakespeare with Polonius’ advice in “Hamlet.”
I’ve never understood what most people imagine the walls in question to be like. The typical New England stone wall is about a foot high and doesn’t keep anything out; it just marks the boundary. Which is helpful for preventing what otherwise might be silly disputes.
@ Chak – Large areas of rural (and mountainous) Pennsylvania are crisscrossed by fieldstone walls. Beside providing a verifiable way to allocate ownership, the primary purpose of those walls was simply to get rid of the rocks in the soil, because they were a severe impediment to plowing the fields. Only rarely (if ever) are the walls high enough to keep an animal from jumping them, and probably only pigs or maybe sheep (not horses or cows).
The homeowner ordered a bunch of lawn care supplies and tools, and ended the order with “Please”. The supplier took “Please” to simply be politeness, but the not-particularly-polite homeowner meant a sign saying “Please”.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Someone that hasn’t had to care for a lawn has just purchased everything necessary to do so.
The please sign is:
* for the grass to read so that it will grow properly after buying all the stuff
* for someone to come and take care of his yard since he doesn’t know how
* to sit next to the ‘Keep off the grass’ sign he has because he doesn’t want to annoy people
None seem a great fit to me….
His tropical shirt makes me wonder if he’s a former New Yorker that has lived in an apartment for his entire life, but has just retired to Florida and has no idea how lawns work and the store said this is what you need.
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I don’t think it’s that complex, just a simple case of “New Yorker” understatement. If you see a sign saying just “Please.” on a freshly treated and trimmed lawn (especially with a sprinkler on it), it’s fairly clear that the intended meaning is “Please keep off the grass.”
P.S. I was wondering if there might be a hidden detail held in his hands, but apparently not. I was able to find the comic on the CD from “The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker” (May 2nd, 1953), but it is not available from the Conde Nast store, so the resolution shown above is the best we can hope for.
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P.P.S. New theory: he’s a cheapskate, and those signs are not prefabricated, but charged by the letter.†
P.P.P.S. † – Recalling the scene in MiB2 in which Laura was named “Employe of the month“.
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I think the guy with the truck is delivering the homeowner’s new yard maintenance stuff. The delivery apparently didn’t include the “please” sign.
Ironically, the homeowner is inquiring about the “polite” sign in a rude, accusatory way.
LikeLiked by 1 person
To start with I wanted to try looking at the picture and asking what the situation is, without yet taking into account the caption. I thought there are two main plausible readings. In the first, which Darren and then Pandemonium have both described, the guy with the truck has made a delivery of the gardening / lawn care tools and supplies, which the homeowner has purchased. But the other was actually what I first thought, that the guy with the truck is a gardener / lawn guy, and he is here for a service day at this homeowner’s lawn (or possibly the first); and he has just unloaded his own tools and some consumables he will be using. (The tools like lawnmower and grass roller will be packed back in the truck when he is done with the job.)
I think both of these are very plausible readings of just the drawing. But only the purchase-delivery scenario survives taking the dialogue into account. (not that we have really outlined a complete story enough to make the cartoon both understandable and funny.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Any chance that yes it’s a delivery not a work-appointment with a gardener, and further the homeowner does not want to do the work himself so wants to hire a gardener service? And that’s what the Please sign will mean — “Please sign me up and put this yard on your lawn-care schedule.”
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Speaking of the travails of getting good lawn care:
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@ Pandemonium – I think you may have the answer! His facial expression certainly does seem “angry”, although it’s difficult to be sure with the limited resolution that we have to work with.
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P.S. @ Mitch – Perhaps Larson’s dog was employing a clever strategy:
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Maybe the dog with the lawnmower was distracted into following a squirrel around.
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Oh, I get it! He’s putting the stuff out on the curb to be given away. Nobody wants it, so he ordered a sign asking them to please take it!
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I don’t really get the cuboid & roller. Did sod used to come in squares? How much would that cover?
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@ Downpuppy – The roller is a standard lawncare tool, but I cannot identify the square object. It’s too big for fertilizer, and way too small for sod.† There are wires around it that makes it look like a bale of hay. Perhaps he’s starting from pure dirt and wants to use hay to keep the seeds moist and protected from birds?
P.S. Small amounts of sod does sometimes come in squares, but I think 1953 predates the common use of sod for private yards.
LikeLike
Sod indeed used to come in squares. (Does it not still?) But I don’t recall it being packed in anything like that rectilinear crate at the back; just laid out on flats, which then were stacked with corner support but still looked mostly open.
The squares could be planted right up against each other for immediate full lawn coverage. But more likely you leave pretty big spaces between the plugs and expect it to grow into those spaces.
I’m not familiar with use of rollers for modest family-home yards in American towns or suburbs. I think of them for use in lawns that are supposed to be special and uniform / smooth; such as golf course greens, or televised British estates.
LikeLike
P.P.S. While (unsuccessfully) hunting for this comic in a higher resolution, I discovered that Rober Day did a wonderful parody of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Fallingwater“, which appeared almost exactly one year before the gardening comic:
LikeLike
I don’t know about 1953 but it was not much later that my family moved to a new subdivision in unincorporated s.w. Dade with a lot of new building and development. And we indeed initially had a small lawn that was sodded with widely-spaced squares on a grid. And it did grow in within a year. This was South Florida, so snow cover and lawn death over the winter were not issues.
LikeLiked by 1 person
A riddle I heard once:
The third largest crop in the US is generally thrown away as unwanted. What is it?
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Kilby. Any idea what the sign in the Falling Waters comic says? I assumed it was an open house, but the lengths of the first 2 words don’t match that.
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Chak: Is a “crop” something that is intentionally grown, and therefore wanted? Of course some part of any crop will be mostly thrown away or plowed under, like straw from wheat or corn stalks. But I don’t know why you would grow wheat and then throw it all away. Here in New England, the largest crop is said to be rocks. Underground forces gradually push them up, so every spring you get a new crop of rocks you have to build walls with or otherwise dispose of.
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@Lola Maybe “Open for Inspection”?
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Chak – if you consider lawn clippings as “harvested”, the answer might possibly be grass, but between mulching and composting, I’m not so sure it’s all thrown away. I’ve also heard that lawns are the largest irrigated crop in America.
Not to take anything away from Day’s “Fallingwater “ parody, but he missed a great opportunity to have the waterfall from each house cascading onto the one below a la those chocolate/Champaign fountains.
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Aha, “grass” or “lawns” is clearly the most promising idea for a good joke/riddle answer!
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Mark in Boston, that gives me a whole new take on Robert Frost.
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@ Lola – MikeD has the right answer, it is definitely “Open For Inspection“. My apologies for embedding a rendered preview above, I meant to include the full image:
P.S. The Conde Nast store offers a “zoom” into the native resolution used for prints.
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Mark in Boston,
The 3rd largest crop in the US is lawn grass, at an estimated 40 million acres (unless I got my units wrong again.)
And I’m sure lots of people compost or otherwise use their grass clippings, but I doubt that most do.
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How sod looks today?
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Deety: Robert Frost’s materials for mending the wall were free for the taking with a practically unlimited supply. That’s why rock walls are everywhere in New England. Particularly in New Hampshire, “The Granite State.”
My English teacher was very insistent that Robert Frost did NOT say “Good fences make good neighbors.” It was the neighbor in the poem who said that, and it is not clear that Frost would agree. Sort of like Shakespeare with Polonius’ advice in “Hamlet.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve never understood what most people imagine the walls in question to be like. The typical New England stone wall is about a foot high and doesn’t keep anything out; it just marks the boundary. Which is helpful for preventing what otherwise might be silly disputes.
(this has become a pet peeve over the years)
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That kind of hand-built wall made from irregular stones probably couldn’t get more than a few feet high unless really wide.
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@ Chak – Large areas of rural (and mountainous) Pennsylvania are crisscrossed by fieldstone walls. Beside providing a verifiable way to allocate ownership, the primary purpose of those walls was simply to get rid of the rocks in the soil, because they were a severe impediment to plowing the fields. Only rarely (if ever) are the walls high enough to keep an animal from jumping them, and probably only pigs or maybe sheep (not horses or cows).
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The homeowner ordered a bunch of lawn care supplies and tools, and ended the order with “Please”. The supplier took “Please” to simply be politeness, but the not-particularly-polite homeowner meant a sign saying “Please”.
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That kind of hand-built wall made from irregular stones probably couldn’t get more than a few feet high unless really wide.
This was actually my comment. I guess I forgot to set the Name field or something.
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