To understand a political cartoon from the past, you have to have a good understanding of the historical events and persons depicted in it, as well as an appreciation of the symbolic currency of the time, specifically, the stock characters and objects that contemporary artists and commentators used to carry their points. This might include such things as the songs, music, poetry, literature, sports, clothes fashions, and celebrity figures of the time. Without this last sort of knowledge, you are liable to miss the point of the cartoon—or at least the sharpness of the point.

You could read into it, for example, today’s meaning of the words and symbols that the artist used, when in fact, it may have changed. The artist and his audience inhabited the same culture and may have shared assumptions that we may not. Bringing these into the light not only reveals the actual intent of the cartoonist, but also reveals to us how parts of our own cultural and political landscape have changed.

History teachers nowadays often introduce political cartoons from the past into their lessons, asking their students to analyze them. Partly, this stems from trends in social history that have newly emphasized the value of looking at the more everyday, ephemeral aspects of culture in trying to understand the past. Partly, too, it stems from the notion that today’s students are much more attuned to visual images than to written texts. Lastly, it fits into the educational emphasis on introducing students to multiple primary sources rather than relying exclusively on the synthetic, authoritative, and detached narrative of a textbook.

On this last point, teachers should not lose sight of the fact that, while old political cartoons are primary sources, opening clear windows into another time, they were created to comment on the people and events depicted, most often by use of written and visual satire, parody, and humor.

Why note this seemingly obvious point? Because surrounding a political cartoon with an elaborate array of serious analytical probes in a classroom lesson—as necessary as it might be—also endangers the patient under the scalpel. At some point in the operation being performed upon it in the classroom, it would seem worthwhile to deliberately step back and simply ask whether the cartoon is “alive,” that is, funny and why it would have been seen as funny when it was created.

Welsh-born cartoonist Leslie Gilbert Illingworth drew the famous cartoon of John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev arm wrestling while sitting on hydrogen bombs. It appeared in the October 29, 1962 edition of the British newspaper The Daily Mail.

Born in 1902, Illingworth started drawing cartoons for the famous British news magazine Punch in 1927. The Daily Mail hired him as well in 1937 and he continued to provide cartoons for both publications for the rest of his career. He gained a measure of national fame for the effective cartoons he drew during England's dogged stand against Nazi Germany.

Illingworth was not an overtly political cartoonist and this is evident in this arm wrestling cartoon. One notices the characteristic Illingworth preference for detail rather than commentary on who is right or wrong. The intensity of the struggle is captured both by the energy that radiates out of Kennedy and Khrushchev's gripped hands, but also by the fact that each is sweating profusely. Each man still has his finger on the button that will detonate the bombs.

Illingworth's drawings contrast sharply with those of Edmund Valtman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and fiercely anti-communist cartoonist for The Hartford Times. On October 30, after the crisis had seemingly passed, his paper published a Valtman cartoon of Khrushchev yanking missile-shaped teeth out of a hideous-looking Castro's mouth. The caption above the illustration reads, “This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You” and the cartoon clearly represents a moment of American gloating over the communists.

That the Illingworth cartoon was published in a British newspaper bears witness to the fact that the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis affected the fate of populations beyond those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed the whole world was watching. The publication date of October 29 is also significant since on October 28, Khrushchev announced that he was withdrawing the missiles out of Cuba and the crisis seemingly had passed. Illingworth's cartoon reminded readers that the superpower struggle would continue and that the possibility of nuclear annihilation remained.