'Portrait of the Rabbit as a Young Beau': John Updike as New Yorker Humorist by Thomas Karshan
https://www.academia.edu/12069751/Portrait_of_the_Rabbit_as_a_Young_Beau_John_Updike_as_New_Yorker_Humorist?auto=download&campaign=upload_email

“…Are we seeing here how civilization, by severing our egoes, decapitates us? Or is this a horrid hallucination of the aggressive competitiveness always implicit in civility? Either way, the cartoon will have offered Updike an early initiation into what he would later recognize as ‘the overall topic’ of William Shawn’s : ‘civilization and its discontents’, the governing topic of all Updike’s writing [ … ] Updike was one of the principal figures in reinventing humour for the new, more sophisticated era that began in 1951 when Ross died and was replaced by Shawn. Like Saul Steinberg and Vladimir Nabokov, who had started before him in the late 1940s, and by both of whom he was in these years greatly influenced, Updike took many of the stock themes of humour in the Ross era, giving them a metaphysical twist which carried them forward into the raw material for his serious fiction”