The artists and writers are talking about Mike? They are? All on their own, without prompting? Sure! All the funny-pages guys have been calling each other on the blower and having a lip over that swell new comedy, Mike. What’s that, Harry? Yeah, I agree - it’s a riot. Say, we ought to do comics on this and send them in to the studio, just to show our appreciation. My sides are still achin’.

The joke's obscure, at least to me. Abie the Agent was a long-running popular cartoon about a Jewish car salesman, There were no characters named Mike or Ike. But: "Mike and Ike" was a strip by Rube Goldberg, and this makes me wonder if the character on the left was a caricature of Goldberg.

Otherwise the panel makes no sense, unless we're expected to know that "Ike" means "Isaac," and Abie would point it out because it sounds Jewish.