I’ve been looking at it on and off all morning and I just don’t get it.
It’s a New Yorker cartoon from 1967. New Yorker cartoons generally aren’t especially funny, but I usually understand the point of the joke.
The artist is just playing with foreground vs background; his body carries on from the open space under the chair, and the 3d nose becomes a curled wire when removed from its normal context.
There’s no ‘joke’ to get, except for your brain getting confused.
If it’s got cultural context, I’m not sure of it, but otherwise it looks like it’s just got a theme of incompleteness that the brain fills in similar to some optical illusions like the Kanizsa triangle. The man has no legs, the chair is incomplete, the table’s top edge isn’t there, the nose.
I do notice some decoration on the collar and shoulders that might point to it being a specific person. Do you know which issue it is from 67?
