It seems like just the other day that I was going through my inventory of postcards showing old cars so that I could illustrate a column filled with fine old jokes. Come to think of it, that WAS just the other day. You can go back and read the last blog any old time you feel like it. Don’t rush; the jokes won’t suddenly become new.
Anyhow on my way to THAT column, I was impressed by the number of times one bit of wordplay turned up. Jokes on postcards worked then the way jokes on TikTok do now” one person uses it and suddenly everyone is. It’s the Bennett Cerf joke philosophy—Who CARES Who Said It First?—in action.
We have looked, hereintofore, at similar phenomena: the fact that Old Fishermen Don’t Die (they just smell that way), the folks who go out into the wilderness and embarrass themselves running around with a bear behind, and the cow stepping on ones of its tender buttons, to name but a few. So I thought I’d take a look at the postcard use of “auto” for “Ought to”.
Postcards are perfect for this joke, of course. Telling people that they owe you a letter or a visit was a major strength of these pre-cellphone texts. But I noticed something odd.
The vast majority of these gags accompany pictures from the very early history of the auto itself: the small, primitive, open vehicles, some of them looking homemade. (Because you could DO that in those days: four bicycle wheels, a box to sit on, and a motor, and you had a car.) Was this a joke which was just so overused by 1910 that the next generation of postcard artists didn’t dare haul it out of the attic?
I did find a few. Having worked in the trade of writing humor, I am aware that an old joke is better than no joke at all if a deadline is looming. There’s always a little nostalgia value: a customer might say “Oh, I remember when THAT used to b funny!”
And you will notice that this artist (since these cards obviously come from the same hand) has four lines in the caption, so that the “auto” pun can be concealed under the camouflage of poetry.
Other artists weren’t quite so shy. I know people who are like this about their automobiles, in fact. “Why do I need a new one when this one still has some mileage in it?” This artist has, furthermore, employed an entirely different sort of camouflage. If the picture is full of action, the reader might skip over the well-worn tires and sputtering engine of the caption.
Here, in fact, the joke is the FOURTH most important part of the postcard, as the artist has clearly spent time to make sure you look at the ladies and then that elegant car, and then rush past the “ought to” to get to the gag about streamlining. I’ll have to try something like that myself with the joke I realized I did NOT make a few paragraphs ago. Surely in all the clutter on the Interwebs I can make a joke about “autopuns”. See, the whole “autopen” busin…no? You auto see some of the other jokes I didn’t make.
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