by Richard S. West

Funniest of Phun (also known as the Phunniest of Awl) was launched in New York in May 1864 by W. Jennings Demorest, publisher of Mme. Demorest’s Quarterly of Fashion, from which he made his fortune.  Four months earlier, Demorest had purchased New York Illustrated News, which he merged into Quarterly of Fashion in August 1864.

Demorest was an abolitionist, prohibitionist and Radical Republican, who utilized Funniest of Phun as a platform for his reformist beliefs.  His publication was positioned to the left of Abraham Lincoln’s Administration, which most of the New York press thought of as pretty liberal already, and became one of Lincoln’s most severe critics.

At Demorest’s direction, cartoonist Frank Bellew belittled President Lincoln as the “National Joker”, an enemy of due process and a free press, who governed by expediency.  Bellew’s cartoons also appeared in Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News, New York Illustrated News, Vanity Fair, and Comic Monthly, among other publications, but were not as anti-Lincoln in them.  Bellew and his brother bought Funniest of Phun from Demorest in 1866 and folded it the next  year. 

Of the three candidates for the presidency in the summer of 1864 – Lincoln, Democrat George B. McClellan and third-party candidate John C. Fremont – Funniest of Phun upheld Fremont as the only one who embodied noble principles and represented the cause of justice.  When Fremont withdrew in September, the publication adopted a “pox on both your houses” attitude toward Lincoln and McClellan, although it clearly despised McClellan more.  After Lincoln won, Funniest of Phun continued its attacks on his character right up to his assassination, which it ignored.

  

 

 

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