A flourishing weekly American humor magazine for close to sixty years, Judge was renowned during the 1920s for bringing a new generation of sophisticated humor writers and cartoonists to the attention of American readers, including S. J. Perelman, Theodor Seuss Geisel ("Dr. Seuss"), Ralph Barton, Johnny Gruelle, Ernie Bushmiller, and Harold Ross.

Judge was founded in New York City in 1881 and survived until 1939 in its initial run, offering a mix of jokes, short humor pieces, reviews, and gag cartoons. The humor magazines of the nineteenth century, unlike late twentieth-century publications such as Mad and Cracked, were aimed at grown-up readers and included topical and political observations as well as broad comedy and ethnic jokes. Judge was founded just five years after the appearance of one of its chief competitors, Puck, which, as one historian has pointed out, soon "shed its crude image—with jokes about minorities, slapstick humor...