Art: Laughing Tiger

The American Scene was under ludicrous attack again last week. Cartoonist Whitney Darrow Jr., for ten years a comic ornament to The New Yorker, published his first collection of drawings, You’re Sitting on my Eyelashes (Random House; $2.50). In the title cartoon a raucously artificial brunette addressed a startled gentleman who had just taken her seat at the movies.

Most of Darrow’s cartoons stick to urban life and the middle class — which he treats with a ridicule heavily touched with fondness. Darrow’s favorite subjects include the laughable aspects of human underwear, the drastic results of heavy, middle-aged drinking, and the leering onset of sex in very small Boy Scouts (“Would you like to come up and look at my merit badges?”). Sometimes Darrow strikes a fine fantastic strain of social criticism. There is, for example, his classic comment on the profit motive. An incredibly cushy plutocrat sits in deep torpor and upholstery and hands a newspaper to his butler: “I’m through with the paper, Roberts. Take it out and sell it.” Other Darrow scenes:

>A nursemaid reading a bedtime story to enthralled five-year-olds (“Coked to the gills, Beardon lunged toward the supine figure on the red-plush couch”).

>A dashing young matron addressing her young son (“Your father and I are now separated, Robert. After this you will please refer to him as ‘that heel’ “).

Whitney Darrow Jr., a thin, neat, nervous young man of 34, is the son of a vice president of Charles Scribner’s Sons. The cartoonist went to Princeton (’31), there art-edited the Princeton Tiger. He sold his first drawings to Judge, College Humor and the old Life. After college he studied at Manhattan’s famed Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton. Says Darrow of this training: “He taught me how to roll Bull Durham cigarets.” Darrow’s first New Yorker appearance was a study of two girl nudists admiring a male fellow nudist: “Last night I saw him in a blue serge suit. Zowie!”