In the '40s, the magazine printed a cartoon depicting a man eating a dog, which, Alden said, wasn't funny. In the 1960s, cartoon dogs were best known for bad behavior ("So you've finally bitten a ...

It’s the same reason the New Yorker has so many cartoons with kings, or barbarians, or guys on desert islands. It’s the context. “It’s just funny when you have a dog say something that a ...