Find me a modern magazine as interesting as either of these...

By the 1920s, and certainly the late 1920s, both Life and Judge were pretty tired. They did a lot of he said/she said jokes, of the kind that drove Harold Ross (founder-editor of The New Yorker) mad. On the other hand, some of the capsule theatre reviews by Robert Benchley for Life are hilarious, especially his long-running battle against "Abie's Irish Rose." The wittiest was a succinct "Hebrews 13:8." Get out your bible and look it up -- it's worth the chuckle.

Hebrews 13:8 -- and so is Abie's Irish Rose.

Actually, it was cartoonist Norm Anthony who revived Judge and Life back in the 1920s. It was he who ditched the old he said/she said format for single captions, not Ross. Ross picked up the concept when he was co-editing Judge with Anthony (They didn't get along) and took it with him when he started The New Yorker. It was Anthony that discovered and promoted Dr. Seuss, S.J. Perelman, and E. Sims Campbell, the African American cartoonist that broke the cartooning color-line. He also founded Ballyhoo magazine, that startling success birthed during the darkest year of the Great Depression. Ballyhoo lambasted advertising (with fake ads for Rice Krispies with a radio attachment- Pour on the milk and they go Snap! Crackle! Vo-do-de-oh-do! Or Horse Feather Cigarettes- So awful tasting that nobody will try to bum one off you. Or The International Radio- "Imagine!... All the crap in the world at your fingertips! Hear foreign radio announcers gargle hot potatoes, ships in distress, etc.") and The New Yorker (One drawing showed a perturbed Harold Ross asking his staff, "Can't anybody tell me what the captions on this week's cartoons mean?"). Credit where credit is due. Anthony was a unsung humor genius.

I'll certainly grant you Anthony is not better known, not as well as he should be (I'm not certain he even has a Wikipedia page). I only claimed that Ross hated the he/she joke format, something that a number of books (like Genius in Disguise) have noted; I didn't claim he revived Judge (he couldn't have, given his short tenure). I have a number of issues of Judge scattered from the mid 1920s to early 1930s. It can be very variable in terms of quality, and frankly, I don't think it lived up to its slogan of "World's Wittiest Weekly." Seuss' stuff (deservedly) is probably some of the best remembered material. Life has some well-known covers (e.g., Leyendecker's Flapper Butterfly), the Benchley reviews, and (aside from what you've mentioned) not much else that's survived over the years. Campbell is another fellow who's largely (and perhaps unfairly) forgotten except by the experts, even if he did create Esky. Surprising, when you figure that minority artists are greatly celebrated these days, and he was a pioneer. At least he has a Wiki page, even though it's a bit thin.

Ballyhoo I've only seen scattered references to. In some ways, a forerunner of MAD in the way it disassembled advertising (I wrote that before I looked it up in Wiki to refresh my memory -- they mention MAD in a similar context). Which may have been a bit of a problem, in that it stepped on too many toes (I do see Wiki's discussion of the point, which is in opposition), and the grip of the Depression was sufficient to choke off any support it might have had (the impression I get is that it got off to a hot start, and then staggered through the decade). Very much inside baseball.

The above, of course, is pure opinion, based on what I've read (like the Ross bios, my copies of Judge, and scattered other things). Obviously, i know you have a good deal of superiority in the subject.

I got my information from Anthony's very rare (and funny) 1946 autobiography How To Grow Old Disgracefully . I used to have a hefty collection of Judge and Life magazines from Anthony's tenures as editor in the 1920s, and got a pretty good idea about what he was doing. He quit Judge because of salary issues, and was fired from Life because he upset the advertisers even through he had increased circulation. Sadly, I had to sell that collection when I had no income and was in dire need of eating cash. I still kept my Ballyhoos, the first 30 issues, though. Ballyhoo was big in its time- Everybody was reading it, getting a kick out of its irreverent attitude and risqué gallows humor, because Ballyhoo did more than just attack advertising, it lambasted all sorts of other nonsense churned up by the Great Depression. Ballyhoo had a circulation of one million by the third issue, and made so much money that it enabled Anthony to produce a successful Broadway review full of social commentary "Americana", which gave the world the hit song "Brother Can You Spare A Dime?" Ballyhoo itself had a hit song named after it, a really mordant glee Anthony created about the Great Depression and the inane attempts to pretend it wasn't happening. I'll quote some lyrics and verse- "Sure business is punk, and Wall Street is sunk / We're all of us broke and ready to croak / Depression they say is in session to stay / We've nothing to junk, can't even get drunk / And all the while they tell us to smile / Cheer up gentle citizen though you have no shirt / Happy days are here again / Cheer up, smile, nertz! / All aboard prosperity, giggle till it hurts / No more breadline charity / Cheer up, smile, nertz! / Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up, cheer / Up cheer, up cheer, up cheer, better times are here! / Sunny smilers we must be the optimist asserts / Lets hang the bastard from a tree! Cheer up, smile, NERTZ!" They had to change "bastard" to "fathead".

I've heard the Eddie Cantor version of that song, with Phil Spitalny's orchestra. It was a "Hit of the Week" record.