This year marks the 100th anniversary of The New Yorker. In honor of that considerable accomplishment, we’re presenting all the cartoons that appeared in that first issue, February 21, 1925. It’s a varied lot, including some CIDUs — were they CIDUs at the time? It’s remarkable to me that the general style of The New Yorker’s humor is recognizable in that first issue.
Pete commented: “The bread line: we are seeing one page of a two page centrefold. The full version compares poor people waiting for bread to rich young women waiting for their escorts to buy dinner.”
see: https://tinyurl.com/4s9452ku
But we are seeing the entire two page centrefold, and the comparison is implicit. I’m posting the complete centrefold here because I’m not sure my link will work if you aren’t a New Yorker subscriber.
Comics I Don't Understand 
“Bread Line” is a puzzlement, since we’re not looking at poor people queueing on the street for charity. Waiting to be seated at a restaurant? Wallflowers at a social event? Short skirts were sufficiently familiar that I don’t think that was the point.
Amelia and her fretting mate are forerunners of the types who’d people the panels of Helen Hopkinson and other observers of the stodgier rich. The implication is that he’s worried about Frenchmen pursuing her, and the joke — a bit unkind — is that she’s not a likely object of pursuit.
Interesting. They do indeed fit TNY as we know it today!
Growing up, my dad had a box in the attic that contained the entire first year of TNY. For some reason he threw it away in the 1980s; I kinda regret that, though if I had it, it would just be sitting in the basement not doing anything, so maybe he was right.
The Bread Line puzzles me, also. Are the sitting women waiting for their man to accompany them into the restaurant? I see that the only men in the cartoon are the maitre d’ and the men accompanying a woman. But both men and women wait for each other to show up, ordinarily. So there’s something about the fact that all the people waiting are women. Unless this is a line of women waiting for some man to come along and buy them dinner … and?
I’m thinking the girls are taxi dancers (“10¢ a Dance”), and the comment is this is what poor girls have to do, just short of being in a bread line, or is there even a difference?
The bread line: we are seeing one page of a two page centrefold. The full version compares poor people waiting for bread to rich young women waiting for their escorts to buy dinner.
see: https://tinyurl.com/4s9452ku
Pete: Centrefold? TNY has changed!!
@Pete: Thanks for the link to the explanation. Makes sense now.
But this is both pages of the two page centerfold. The comparison is implicit, rather than explicit. I would be more likely to make that linkage if the cartoon had been from, say, 1931 rather than 1926.
https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1925-02-21/flipbook/016/
(I added the whole image above, because the link may not work for non-subscribers)
Related to “bread line” is “meal ticket” as in “She goes around with him because he’s her meal ticket.”
I suspect “bread line” may also be a double-entendre, as “bread” has meant “money” since at least the 1930s, and “sustenance” or “a living” even earlier.
Bread lines were around in the twenties. There’s a silent Buster Keaton short where a line of men wait for a free bread window to open, and Buster fails to notice he’s waiting behind a store mannequin.
I rather picked up a vibe from “The Bread line” that the young ladies are sitting there hoping a gentleman will ask them to dinner so they can have a meal – with an implication of what they will doing to “pay” for dinner afterwards.
(Or do I just have a dirty mind?)
Left out – so the young ladies are waiting in a classy type of “bread line”, but one in which the men who will escort them to eat expect a “sort of payment” in exchange for same.
Wow…a hundred years of readers saying “I don’t get it.”