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GREETINGS arches over the cat like a banner at a county fair. HUZZ sits below it, flat and final, like a stamp on a passport. Between the two words is an orange tabby in a backwards red cap, holding a rainbow swirl lollipop in one paw, purple lightning cracking behind its head, and an expression that suggests it has just been handed a trophy for a contest it did not enter. That is the whole design. Two words, one cat, one lollipop, one bolt of purple weather. And yet the shirt works as visual rhetoric because of a single decision: the cat does not sell the joke. It refuses to.…

The bird is a white goose, or close enough to one. It stands upright in an orange prison uniform, facing the viewer, holding a black mugshot board at chest height. Above it, in caps, the shirt reads: GOT TOO SILLY. The board is blank. That blank board is the whole joke, and it is also the whole problem. A mugshot board is a prop that exists to identify. It carries a name, a number, a charge. Here it carries nothing. The bird has been processed, photographed, dressed in state-issued orange, and then handed a sign that says nothing at all. The crime is in the caption. The board is just…

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. This is not an independent review. Start with the missing mark. The shirt reads WAIT in white, stacked above an orange cat. Below the cat, I’M GOATED in white letters with a thick orange outline. There is no printed comma after WAIT. That absence is the whole gag, and it is worth more than most captions I have seen this year. The cat wears black sunglasses, lowered far enough that both eyes remain visible above the lenses. Not hidden. Not cool-by-concealment. The eyes are still in the frame, which means the cat is not pretending to be above the…

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The first thing the eye finds is not the dog. It is the shadow. On the cream ground of the shirt, a small tan chihuahua stands in red boxing gloves. The gloves are the size of its head. Its stance is upright, paws up, chin level. Behind it, a brick wall runs the width of the print. And cast against that wall is a black wolf-shaped silhouette, many times the dog’s height, ears pointed, shoulders broad, jaws implied. The wolf is not a second animal. It is a shadow. That distinction is the whole gag, and it is also…

James Thurber’s 1939 cartoon “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” shows a disheveled Union general slouched in a chair, rambling incoherently at a bewildered Robert E. Lee. The caption reads: “And so, General Lee, if you will just—uh—just sort of let me sort of sneak back into—uh—sort of sort of…” That trailing, stammering, perfectly flat sentence is the joke. The drawing is funny. The caption is devastating. Remove the caption and you have a man who looks unwell talking to a man who looks uncomfortable. Add the caption and you have the Civil War renegotiated by a drunk. The line does not explain the image. It completes it. And…

You laugh. Half a second later, you find out what you laughed at. That tiny delay — the beat between the laugh and the thought — is the whole engine of the form, and it is the least examined half-second in public life. Psychologists call part of the mechanism incongruity resolution. Arthur Koestler called the underlying move bisociation. Working cartoonists mostly call it “the second read.” Whatever name it answers to, the best cartoons make you laugh and then think because the laugh and the thought are two detonations of the same charge — and the pause between them is where the cartoon does its real work. The Laugh Is…