Cartoons Magazine cartoons

The New Yorker cartoons found in Mad Men

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Alan Gardner May 20, 2015 1 minute 1 comment

Michael Maslin looks at the New Yorker cartoons used in the background of Peggy Olson’s office in the TV Show Mad Men

One of those is copy chief Peggy Olson, played by Elisabeth Moss. In the fifth season episode ?Dark Shadows?, which takes place in 1966, Peggy opens a pitch meeting for a soft drink with ?Everyone loves the cartoons in The New Yorker, and I thought we could do that kind with the guy crawling across the Sahara dying of thirst?. Her idea doesn?t fit the campaign, but it fits her character. Peggy?s come a long way (vintage advertising reference!) since starting at Sterling Cooper, working her way up to copywriter when few women were anything other than secretaries. She?s an upward striver who would have reveled in her new found metropolitan lifestyle (although as a young professional she might not have been the ideal demographic for The New Yorker at that time- its ads from those days seemed to mostly target the kind of people who buy furs and travel to India for the food).

Three fictional years later, Peggy has a bit more office real estate and she decorates it partly with cartoons. In the seventh season episodes ?Severance? and ?New Business? there are four New Yorker cartoons visible on the wall (I couldn?t identify the other four- it?s likely they were culled from one of the other magazines that ran cartoons back then, of which there were still many).