Upside-down tennis players comic illusion, Malden, MA, 1908

About this postcard

The card shows a comic tennis match turned upside down: two players stand on their heads, one in a red jacket and one in white with a red polka-dot cap, rackets and net inverted against green ground and a blue field of clouds. The scene reads as a reflection in water, a visual joke common in early twentieth-century comic postcards. The sender in Malden, Massachusetts, used the joke to tease Charlotte in Amesbury: "When you play tennis be careful and not do this to some poor chap." The note turns the upside-down match into a friendly warning, the kind of light humor that made postcards a quick everyday message in 1908.