The joke starts with a barrel.
In “Off the Track,” a strip from Charles M. Payne’s Bear Creek Folks, a portly traveler in a top hat arrives at a tiny railway to find his ride waiting: a barrel on wheels, pulled by a toy-sized locomotive. His little companion, perched at the controls, is proud of it.
“Oh, that’s our new compartment coach, the very latest thing from abroad,” the little man says. The traveler, suitcase in hand, climbs in. Then he discovers the catch.
The door is locked — as it always is, his companion explains, in compartment coaches. From inside the barrel, the traveler can’t see a thing. It only gets worse from there.
The barrel bounces over the roughest road its passenger ever rode on, stars flying, until it leaves the rails entirely.
Payne drew Bear Creek Folks for the Sunday pages of The Philadelphia Inquirer, launching it on October 9, 1904. He had come up through the Pittsburgh papers — he joined the Pittsburgh Post as a cartoonist in 1896 — and his first notable strip, Coon Hollow Folks, ran in the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times. For years the two features were thought to be the same strip under different titles; comics historian Allan Holtz later showed they were two separate series, in two different papers, with the same style, stories, and even characters.
“Say, we must be off the track or sumpin’,” the traveler says as the barrel smashes into a tree — and into somebody’s house. Specifically, the Scratch Cat’s house.
Out comes the Scratch Cat, fur up, claws out, and the traveler runs for his life, suitcase and all, yelling for help.
Payne’s later fame came from somewhere else entirely: S’Matter, Pop?, the family gag strip he drew from 1911 to 1940, first for the Bell Syndicate and then for the New York World and The Sun. It made him one of the most popular cartoonists of his generation. He signed his work C. M. Payne and went by “Popsy,” and he drew in a loose, sketchy style that only got sparer as the years went on.
By the last panel, the traveler is sitting on the rails, dazed, blaming his driver: “The consarn yap never even told me I was off the track!” The cat, for its part, seems ready for round two.
Payne died in 1964, in poverty — a hard end for a man who had spent nearly seventy years making newspaper readers laugh. The barrel coach is long gone. The gag, somehow, still works.