This page seems to be having a run on Marital Woes postcards. A really serious blogger would either settle in for an in-depth discussion of marriage in comedy through the centuries, or move on to some other significant topic, like “Are there regional differences in what people put into their devilled eggs?” But we are not a food blog here (p.s.: I already did a blog on the relationship between devilled eggs and devilled ham and devil’s food cake, which you can check elsewhere on the Interwebs.)
However, what we are going to do is switch from infidelity at the office to issues closer to home. It surprises me how long jokes about dealing with the maid went on in a world which was gradually deciding that hiring servants was the exception rather than the rule.
The joke, of course, depends less on the foolery itself than in the master of the house getting caught at it. There are other comic possibilities, but those involve more words and action than can really be done in one postcard illustration, like this one from 1906 or thereabouts.
There are certain conventions to be observed in framing the joke, which might not need a caption, but which DID require that the maid be a good deal younger than the husband cheating or the wife cheated on. Not all maids were, or are, twenty-somethings with the budget needed to pay for short, suggestive uniforms. But, again, though there might be excellent comedy in a story about a young man cheating on a young wife with a maid who is twice his age, it would be hard to do that on a postcard, even if you used both sides. (Of the postcard, I mean. I WISH you would stop letting these stray giggles of yours interrupt us in our study of vintage comedy.)
It’s the “getting caught” moment which has the comic impact required.
Even when that moment is denied, at least for now.
Or when somebody other than the lady of the house handles the discovery.
When hubby is having a heavy-duty flirtation with the cook, of course, the cook doesn’t even need to be present. Cooks seem always to have been involved in making biscuits or something similar when the mister drops by the kitchen.
Yeah, maybe someday I will also do an in-depth study of the handprint postcard. Anybody who wants to can take the job of analyzing just where those handprints are and deciding what was going on in the kitchen.
The same goes for those of you who might be interested in why there don’t seem to be many postcards about the lady of the house fooling around with the chauffeur. Is it because more postcards were bought by men, who wouldn’t have found that funny? Or did this arise out of a desire to mock the rich and their minions? (Look back over the cards in this column: how many of these homes look big enough to require a host of servants? For cleaning, I mean: not for other purposes.) Maybe, looking over this selection, postcard cartoonists simply liked drawing feather dusters. We can return to this, I suppose, at some future date. I need to get back to devilled egg recipes. (The maid just brought me another tray. Gotta go.)
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