A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were discussing magazine cartoons — the kind where there's a drawing and then the caption is printed under the drawing — that made us laugh out loud. I'm talking about the kind that you see in The New Yorker and almost nowhere else these days.
I mentioned a few favorites to my friend and recently on the 'net, I came across a copy of one of them. It was done by Charlie Barsotti and I believe it ran in National Lampoon. At least, it was in some publication I was reading back when NatLamp was thing and it did make me laugh way more than such cartoons usually do.
As you may know, the custom in magazines that run/ran this kind of thing is for the artist to submit piles of "roughs" — quick sketches not up to publication standards. If the editor decides they want a certain gag, the cartoonist is then commissioned to do a more polished rendering of it and that's what they purchase and publish.
At least, they did it that way for a long time. But in the late sixties, there were a couple of cases where when the finished version was delivered, the editor decided the rough was funnier and so they printed the rough. And there seem to have been some instances where a magazine was about to go to press, there was a desperate need for a cartoon to fill a certain space and the editor, having no polished/finished cartoons available, printed a rough.
Around 1970 or thereabouts, there were articles in a few cartoonist magazines (Cartoonist PROfiles, I believe was one) about this and it led to more editors feeling it was okay to do that. That in turn led to some cartoonists making their roughs more polished, which in turn led to more of them being printed.
I don't know for sure that what we're looking at here is something the late Mr. Barsotti submitted as a rough sketch but it's way less slick than was usual for his work in print. If the editor to whom it was submitted laughed as much as I did about it, he might have decided to dispense with the fancy redraw and just go with this. I would have.