The Means, The Ends

    There are some jokes which appear over and over in the postcard world, and bits of wordplay that seemed to leap from cartoonist to cartoonist and company to company.  There is the amorous golfer (want to play a round?), the tourist in the ice cream parlor observing how broadening travel is, the little brown hen and the big red rooster.  I might, unless sent a sizeable bribe, consider some of these this week.  But the one which has turned up most often, at least among ther postcards which have been condemned to my inventory is a simple, easy connection between a word people could say and a word they couldn’t, but did.

    Exactly how and when the small equine mammal and a person’s seaterrumpus got associated isn’t known, but both uses of the word go back nearly a thousand years.  The fact that one could talk about the animal but not the anatomy created an assortment of comic possibilities.

    Of course, by the time the gag was really popular, people didn’t keep donkeys or burros around the house except in the wild west.  So travel formed the theme of many such cards.  This one, for example, is repeated by different artists for different state borders.

    The association with canyon and mountain travel was another frequent choice.

    Any kind of traveling could be exhausting

    But the assiduous traveler persevered.

    And sent a postcard to let people know you had arrived safely

    And were enjoying the sights of the local flora and fauna.

     A really popular travel card was this sort of insurance.  I’ve seen an assortment of designs and rewordings

     Meaning a LOT of people expected to be in this predicament.

    Not all of the possibilities involved travel.  Some assertions are simply generally observation on kindness to animals.

    Or an admiration of our fellow creatures.

    However, sometimes these innocent compliments could be misunderstood.  Sometimes a postcard company (Kropp, in this case) would assume a customer might be squeamish about such a simple tribute.

    So these companies would allow you to use some other synonym and still tell the tale.