I promised you an Easter Bunny: Berryman on the Kennedy spending program, 1961

I promised you an Easter Bunny is a Jim Berryman cartoon for the Washington Evening Star dated 31 March 1961. A cigar-smoking magician pulls a dollar-eyed rabbit labeled "Kennedy Spending Program" out of a hat labeled "Congress," and a startled man in a "Taxpayer" sash loses his own hat.

The drawing

A magician in a tailcoat, cigar in his mouth, holds a rabbit up by the ears. The rabbit has dollar signs for eyes. The top hat it came out of is labeled with the branch of government that votes the money. Beside the act stands a man wearing a sash, caught by surprise and losing his hat. The catalog title supplies the caption, "I promised you an Easter Bunny."

KENNEDY SPENDING PROGRAM

CONGRESS

TAXPAYER

JIM BERRYMAN WASHINGTON STAR......

How the joke works

The argument is in the labels. The program carries the President's name, the hat is Congress, and the only person in the picture who is not performing is the taxpayer. A gift that is pulled out of a hat looks free, and the cartoon's point is that it is not: someone in the audience is paying for the trick.

FRAME tags it card stacking and calls the tag approximate. The cartoon shows only the cost side of the spending proposals. It names no program, no amount and no benefit, so a reader learns nothing about what the money was for. That is normal for an editorial cartoon, which compresses a view rather than weighing a bill.

The view rests on a constitutional fact. The power of the purse belongs to Congress, and every dollar it appropriates is paid for by someone. Berryman labels the hat Congress, which puts the source of the money where the Constitution puts it. A cartoonist at a private newspaper put the President's name on the rabbit.

Other Berryman cartoons on this site from the Kennedy years are L'etat, C'est Moi, Let Me Through! and I Just Didn't Realize I Was So Bad Off.