Introducing Laugh Lines: The New Yorker’s Cartoon History Game

There are those who believe that laughter is timeless: that the things we find funny today would have similarly amused our grandparents’ grandparents, and vice-versa. In support of this theory, look at Oscar Wilde’s quips or Lucille Ball’s pratfalls, which still get laughs after all these years. As counter-evidence, look at, say, Punch, the popular Victorian weekly, whose cartoons lampooning the fad for bicycle suits or the incompetence of the first Pan-Anglican Synod don’t pack quite the same punch today.

Naturally, some jokes have longer shelf lives than others; political satire doesn’t tend to age as well as a good old pie to the face. But even the most transcendent comedy is a product of its time. For the cultural anthropologist, then, a joke can be a fascinating artifact, full of information about the world from whence it came.

Enter Laugh Lines, our new weekly game that challenges you to guess when cartoons from The New Yorker’s hundred-year archive were originally published. To do this successfully, you’ll need to search for context clues in images and captions: the way people dress and speak, the technologies they use, the pop-culture icons and world events that preoccupy them. We don’t expect you to pinpoint the cartoons’ exact dates; instead, your goal is to place them relative to one another on a time line.

For a demonstration and some tips on strategy, watch this video starring Jesse Eisenberg, The New Yorker’s official (according to him) joke historian.

We’ll publish a new Laugh Lines every Monday throughout 2025, in celebration of The New Yorker’s centenary. You can play by visiting the Puzzles & Games Dept. hub or the Laugh Lines archive; subscribers can also find it in the Play tab of the New Yorker iOS app. To stay up to date on all of our games, including crosswords, quizzes, and cryptics, sign up for our newsletter.

And in case you were wondering, the first Pan-Anglican Synod (1867) predated the vogue for bicycle suits (1890s). It seems that both were pretty funny at the time; I guess you had to be there. ♦