Better a Live Cluck Than a Dead Duck (1943), a New Yorker joke for security

A Whitney Darrow Jr. cartoon, reprinted by courtesy of The New Yorker, became this 1943 Silence Means Security poster. At a dance check room one woman complains that her serviceman date "don't know where he's been, or where he's going, or anything," and the sheet answers with a rhyme (NAID 513959).

The joke, as printed

The archive describes two women at a dance check room watching a serviceman who has no idea he is being discussed. The partly legible lettering in the drawing reads "CHECK ROOM" and "BENEFIT DANCE PROCEEDS TO NAVY." One woman's line is the cartoon's caption. The poster then adds its own headline and campaign slogan.

"The one I'm with is certainly a cluck.

He don't know where he's been, or where he's going, or anything."

Better a live cluck

than a dead duck

... SILENCE MEANS SECURITY ...

[signature:] Whitney Darrow Jr.

Courtesy of The New Yorker and the artist

A magazine cartoon put to government use

The credit line is the interesting part. The drawing came from a commercial magazine and its artist, and the poster thanks both. The FRAME record names no agency, only the Silence Means Security campaign and the Government Printing Office imprint, and it records the sheet as a U.S. government work in the public domain. Purpose in the tombstone: "Warn or inform."

The record does not say whether the cartoon ran in the magazine before the poster or how the permission was arranged. This page does not guess.

Ignorance as a virtue

The archive tags fear appeal and plain folks. The plain-folks part is the setting: a benefit dance, two women at the check room, a date she calls a cluck. The fear is in the last word of the rhyme.

The turn is clever. The woman means it as a complaint. The poster reads the same line as praise: a man who cannot say where he has been or where he is going cannot let it slip. For a soldier, keeping movement plans to himself is a sound rule, and the sheet makes the point with a laugh instead of a threat. It is gentler than a grave marker, and it asks for discretion from the person who holds the secret. The women are not told to report him.

Other sheets on this site carry the same Silence Means Security line: the War Department's Wise Old Owl and its 1942 WAAC security poster. For a darker version of the theme, see A Careless Word... Another Cross. The rumor clinics case study covers a newspaper answer to wartime talk.