There is never the usual outpouring of response when my column deals with bygone jokes I just can’t figure out. But I have to produce these now and again. A blogger always runs the risk of being considered omniscient and infallible, and I MUST do my best to correct this notion before someone demands I take over the government, or the banks, or the newspaper funnies pages and run these institutions properly. So I present here postcards like the one above, which obviously had a point about women and beauty treatments. Can’t quite see it: were we commenting on the fashion for beauty spots, or was there a fad for sprouting mushrooms around your mouth?
These are not all antiques. This comes from one of Absolut’s series of surefire gags around the turn of the current century, usually involving a picture puzzle where you needed to figure out what part of the picture had been made to look like a vodka bottle. But as a Scrooge scholar of minor fame, I must admit the punchline is eluding me. I’m missing whatever reference to Ebenezer they intended. The scene is spooky enough to involve ghosts, I guess, and there IS a Christmas Present.
I can’t even tell what this card from the same era is advertising. This may be because I don’t quite recognize that device as a phone, and it may be because phones could not, at that time, send texts or emails. So what makes it “eChat”? Was this the work of minds who also knew very little about the new electronic communications, who just figured anything with an e on the front of it would sell?
Or was it just an opportunity to send out a picture of a pretty girl and let the audience do the rest? That’s all I can think of with THIS card. It is a pinup first and foremost, of course, but I think the illustration would have been better used as part of a competition. I can see it being used even today in some corporation: “Write a good answer for the young man: First Prize, a box of company pencils and an all-expense paid trip to HR.”
Other cards just take aim at an obvious joke and miss. Unless I’M missing something obvious. We have discussed the “I Should Worry” fad, which involved this formula and a pun, generally about some mild disaster: “I should spill the glue and get stuck up”. This artist didn’t get that. If there had been a person in a swimming suit AND a bear we might have laughed at the homonym. Pointing out the two spellings is merely an insult.
I’ve studied this one for a while. Did the cartoonist READ the joke? I understand what we’re going for, but the couple could be a lot closer together, to prompt some wise guy to deliver the wisecrack.
See, what makes pearls so rare is that oysters are NOT always ready to shell out; even pearl buttons are scarce these days. What saves this, a little, is that throwaway joke on the sign, though the gag is now limited to those who recall a movie show included cartoons and other brief films known as short subjects or just shorts. (As in the fine but defunct old joke, “She paid her dues in Hollywood: for years she was filmed in nothing but shorts. Of course, you can’t show THOSE pictures in theaters.”)
And couldn’t the artist have had the man on the ladder looking THROUGH he glasses? Nice “cheesecake denied” trick with one shapely leg all we can see of the passerby, but that just makes sure the card doesn’t work as a pinup OR a visual gag. (“Visual” gag? Great: it’s catching.)
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