Burr Shafer (October 24, 1899 – June 25, 1965) was an American

cartoonist A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in both drawing and writing cartoons (individual images) or comics (sequential images). Cartoonists differ from comics writers or comic book illustrators in that they produce both the literary and g ...

. His cartoon collections featured the character of J. Wesley Smith appearing in various historical settings. The underlying gag was that Smith was history's greatest wrong-guesser, constantly sneering at historical or cultural turning points that his modern audience knew would turn out to be significant. These sometimes-obscure historical satires moved U.S. President Harry S. Truman to write "I'm very proud that I'm smart enough to get the point." His cartoons appeared in ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'' and ''

The Saturday Review of Literature ''Saturday Review'', previously ''The Saturday Review of Literature'', was an American weekly magazine established in 1924. Norman Cousins was the editor from 1940 to 1971. Under Norman Cousins, it was described as "a compendium of reportage, es ...

''. The J. Wesley Smith character, while not explicitly identified with the explorer John Smith, was depicted in the explorer's situation in a cartoon panel about

Pocahontas Pocahontas (, ; born Amonute, known as Matoaka, 1596 – March 1617) was a Native American woman, belonging to the Powhatan people, notable for her association with the colonial settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. She was the daughter of ...

. The joke, as he had his head on her father's chopping block with the ax about to come down, was that, with the middle name of Wesley, he should not be confused with real John Smith. Burr Shafer died in

Orange County, California Orange County is located in the Los Angeles metropolitan area in Southern California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 3,186,989, making it the third-most-populous county in California, the sixth-most-populous in the United States, ...

References

1899 births 1965 deaths American cartoonists The New Yorker cartoonists {{US-cartoonist-stub