Pandemic Panacea: Laughing Through Quarantine

Pandemic Panacea is a collection of cartoons juxtaposing old magazine photos with crisp new captions. These absurdist cartoons are reminiscent of Gary Larson. Each cartoon first appeared as a postcard sent to a friend to share a laugh.

On March 12, 2020, I began self-isolation, sheltering from the Covid 19 pandemic. I set about on a bit of house cleaning, ran across a box of Popular Mechanicsmagazines from the 1940s and ‘50s. They were full of racy race cars, speed thrills, and most of all rampant hilarity. Not intentionally humorous but rendered absurd with the passing of decades.

So, I started to cut out vintage photographs and images to Scotch tape to an index card. At first, the cards were oddities–the sweeping fins on the cars or the peculiar fashions. Then I started adding captions.

I laughed more–an anti-pandemic laugh. Laughter is communal. So I decided to make other people laugh–write a caption, imagine a friend laughing, put a stamp on it, and send it off.

The first few months of isolation stretched into six months, 10 months, 12 months and more without a return to normal. I kept making postcards though–through the summer, into the fall and right into 2021. Eventually, I had sent a new postcard every day for a year, excluding Sundays.

The humor I drew from the old Popular Mechanicsshifted during that time. I began to see each image as a moment in a story, tailoring the caption to capture the human characters in the scene: how did they reach this moment and why. Nothing is funnier than humans struggling through the comic absurdities of life.

I laughed alone when I made the cards, but I could imagine the laughter of my friends. For a postcard moment, I wasn’t alone.