Treasure Trove: Who Should Not Live and Be Well?

After the 1967 Six Day War, the originator of the comic book hero Captain America produced a spoof on the war and its political aftermath.  A Funny Thing Happened To Me on the Way to Tel Aviv is a 66 page satirical magazine created and edited by Joe Simon and sold for 50 cents.

Its pages contain photographs of Egyptian and Jordanian leaders with comic style word balloons and corny jokes (for example: “The height of Israeli gall: while waiting for negotiations at the U.N. to begin, one of them opened a kosher restaurant in Damascus.”) The magazine reflected the swagger across the Jewish world following Israel’s miraculous military victory.

Simon was no stranger to controversial humor. He edited Sick magazine throughout the 1960s which in its first issue described itself as “a grim collection of revolting humor.” It contained tasteless politically incorrect humor much like the stand up routines of controversial comics such as Lenny Bruce (who apparently purchased 100 copies of each edition that included excerpts from his routines.)

Before he produced humor magazines, Simon (1913-2011) created or co-created many important comic book characters in the Golden Age of Comics in the 1930s and 40s. Together with Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) they created Captain America, the Newsboy Legion, the Boy Commanders, Manhunter, Fighting American and the Fly. By the late 1940s, Simon and Kirby created the romance comic genre and were early pioneers of horror comics.

On the cover of Captain America #1 issued in 1940, Captain America punched Hitler in the face. Simon and Kirby did this to draw attention to the growing threat of the Nazis in Europe at a time when Americans were isolationists. American Nazis were not happy with Timely Comics (now called Marvel Comics) for doing so, since this was more than a year before the United States entered World War II. The cover of Captain America #46 issued in April 1945 shows the superhero liberating a concentration camp and confronting Nazis in the act of committing atrocities. Both of these comic books were donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC earlier this year.

Simon used his pen and his sense of humor to stand for the Jewish people. In his Funny Thing magazine, he includes this legal disclaimer:

“The captions in this publication are entirely fictitious. As for the characters, they should live and be well.  Except, maybe, for one or two…”

These days, I don’t think we would be able to limit ourselves to “one or two”.

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Treasure Trove is a program of The Herzl Project. Another program is The #Herzl100. 100 Herzl artifacts will be posted over 100 days on Instagram, FaceBook and TikTok. Search #Herzl100 on any of these platforms to see the first 60 artifacts, with the Top 40 still to go! A new one drops every day.

For more treasures from the Herzl and Zionism Collection of David Matlow, which has appeared weekly in the Treasure Trove column in the Canadian Jewish News (www.thecjn.ca) since February 2021, see https://herzlcollection.com/treasure-trove