John Gallagher Part Two: 1000 Jokes! - Gag Cartoons 1954 - 1965

Want to see some great cartoons by one of the most prolific gag cartoonists ever? Here's "John Gallagher Part Two: 1000 Jokes! - Gag Cartoons 1954 - 1965" written by Dick Buchanan. Part one is here. Thank you, and take it away, Dick:

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JOHN GALLAGHER
   Part Two: 1000 Jokes!

  (Gag Cartoons 1954 – 1965)

Laughing Out Loud #5 October-December, 1957. One of the six covers Gallagher rendered between 1956 to 1958.



John Gallagher received the National Cartoonist Society’s Gag Cartoon Award for 1957 and 1971. His brother George Gately created the comic strips, Hapless Harry and Heathcliff.

An avid baseball fan, sports was one of his favorite subjects--baseball, boxing, horse racing, hunting and fishing. These cartoons found a happy home in Sport Magazine, True Magazine and Golf Magazine as well as The Saturday Evening Post. Animals were another subject Gallagher portrayed in countless gags. His lions, parrots, giraffes and dogs were portrayed with his unique humorous touch.

Like many cartoonists before and since, John Gallagher had a healthy disdain for editors. Shortly after he abandoned freelancing, he shared his thoughts in an interview by Jim and Gerry Ruth in Cartoonists Profiles (December, 1971):

“One of the most discouraging things about the gag field was the part that the editors played. No one wants to be accused of not having a sense of humor, but the buying of professional humor requires more background and knowledge than many editors had. There was constant interference and control of visual humor by people who were more at home with writing than humor. I always felt that gag selection should have been in the hands of a person involved in the field.”

Gallagher said he sold his best gags not to the major magazines but to 1000 Jokes Magazine. “I always felt I sold my best stuff to 1000 Jokes. Bill Yates, the editor over there, got some of my best gags. Both he and John Norment, who was editor after him, had good backgrounds in the business. They knew humor and they knew how to pick gags.”

In that spirit, here is a selection of John Gallagher’s cartoons from the pages of 1000 Jokes Magazine and its sister publication, For Laughing Out Loud . . .


1. 1000 Jokes Magazine August-October, 1954.

2. 1000 Jokes Magazine May-July, 1955.

3. 1000 Jokes Magazine November, 1955-December, 1956.

4. For Laughing Out Loud February-April, 1957.

5. For Laughing Out Loud February-April, 1957.

6. For Laughing Out Loud February-April, 1957.

7. 1000 Jokes Magazine September-November, 1958.

8. 1000 Jokes Magazine June-August, 1958.

9. For Laughing Out Loud October-December, 1958.

10. 1000 Jokes Magazine June-August, 1959.

11. For Laughing Out Loud January-March, 1960.

". . . . Being of sound mind and body. . . ."

12. For Laughing Out Loud October-December, 1961.

13. For Laughing Out Loud January-March, 1962.

14. 1000 Jokes Magazine September-November, 1963.

15. 1000 Jokes Magazine September-November, 1964.

16. 1000 Jokes Magazine March-May, 1965.