Keeping Up With the Joneses

For the first time in class today I heard the phrase "Keeping Up With the Joneses" and I thought it was the strangest thing ever. Though I had never heard that phrase before, I am familiar with what it means. Keeping Up With the Joneses encompasses the idea that you always have to compare yourself with your neighbors in the sense that if you saw that they bought something new and cool then you have to buy something that was newer and cooler. We see this as an indication of social status. If we fail to "Keeping Up With the Joneses" then we are socially inferior and we must do everything we can to fix that gap.  Upon further research I was able to find that the phrase became popular when  cartoonist Arthur R. "Pop" Momand it in a comic strip (which ran for 26 years) by Associated Newspapers. Below are two of his works.

As you can see both comics make fun of the idea that a person must always find a way to somehow

be better than their neighbors. The first comic makes fun of the idea of "Keeping Up With the Joneses" because the man thinks that he is dining with someone wealthy (thinking about how impressive he will seem to his neighbors) when in reality the "mogul" is the help. Just like the second comic indicates that they are trying to one up their neighbors by saying that they dined with Swedish ambassador when they don't even know what he looks like.