As the name implies—"gag" being a show business term for a comedic idea—these cartoons are most often intended to provoke laughter.
Popular magazines that have featured gag cartoons include Punch, The New Yorker and Playboy.
[citation needed] In the mid-1950s, gag cartoonists found a new market with the introduction of highly popular studio cards in college bookstores.
This was turned into a 1960s television series which ran for two years, in an agreement in which Addams gave his characters names and more developed characteristics.
Cartoonist Ted Key created a gag panel about a bossy maid named Hazel for The Saturday Evening Post in 1943.