If you’ve been here before, you know that one of our chief activities is looking at old postcards to see what we can learn from them (and to see whether I can sell them, but that’s a different issue.) From time to time I run across a card with a joke that has so completely lost its point with the passage of time that no amount of Interwebs searching can bring that punchline back. We’re not going to discuss that sort of thing today. These are some cards that have left me with minor puzzles which do not detract from the card’s original appeal. Here, for example, we see at waitress at the Molokai Bar in the Mai-Kai, a Tiki restaurant which still exists in Fort Lauderdale. What she is holding in her hands is the Mystery Bowl, a beverage served only to the very adventurous…back when this card was issued. The Mai-Kai, perhaps motivated by the fact that the law is not fond of mystery ingredients, no longer serves the Mystery Bowl (or at least does not mention in on their online menu.) So what was in the Mystery Bowl? It must have been an expensive and potent potable, since the purchaser not only got the bowl but that string of orchids around her neck. (I know; I was trying to resist the pull of the traditional lei jokes.)
This is more of a marketing mystery. This basic joke here was very popular—people liked the ass gag—and I pulled it from inventory because you HAVE to list the more common cards. Only after I scanned it did I notice that remark about Rip-Snorting West Texas, which was NOT on other copies I had. Checking the mighty database of eBay, I find that the Curt Teich Company did this on at least two unrelated cards (the other is a fireman carrying a lady down a ladder.) How many cards did they repurpose for Rip-Snorting West Texas? Was it just one store in Amarillo (where most of the used versions of these have been mailed) and was it just those two cards or anything that was overstocked back at the warehouse? And did they do it for, say, East Los Angeles or North Woonsocket?
While dealing with Curt Teich in the Wild west, THIS little mystery is just something I want to know. This was one of their most popular silhouette postcards, and you can see why. But I was wondering about that verse. It seems such a perfect start to a song, and yet, when I look it up, all the Interwebs will show me is this postcard. Was it just a couplet composed for this? If so, could somebody out there please write the rest of the song, so I can stop worrying about it?
I was brung up on New Yorker cartoons, meself, and New Yorker editors destroyed the work of many a cartoonist by demanding “Who is speaking?” This would NOT have passed muster. Neither of our onlookers is expressing the opinion: their mouths aren’t open and their expressions don’t go with the sentiment. Is it just the opinion of Ray Walters, our cartoonist? Is he really talking about the woman who SEEMS to be the subject, or the demure young lady at the table, whose own figure is a little…let’s move on.
The next few are just glitches in joke history, that question you really ought never to ask: “Who told it first?” I also grew up with Spike Jones records, and of course, Doodles Weaver’s rendition of the dialogue on “William Tell Overture” (known to most of us as “Beetle Bomb”, which is how we heard the name of the racehorse Feitlebaum.) We hear how the progress of the race included Cabbage leading by a head and Girdle in the stretch. The record was so popular that a board game was based on it (with Beetle Bohm, so there.) But this card dates from before the 1948 release of the record. Did this cartoonist hear the song on the radio first, or are the jokes just so obvious they didn’t need to be swiped?
This card, on the other hand, seems to have come out at about the same time that Halo Shampoo was promoting itself with one of advertising’s most nearly immortal jingles. The mystery here is “Did nobody get sued over this?”
A huge effect on the peculiar structure of my brain was the nostalgia boom of the 1970s (we have a tradition of nostalgia crazes going back to at least 1826.) So of course I know about Ted Lewis and his trademark call during performances of “Is Everybody Happy?” Glancing through eBay, I found two or three cards from 1907 to 1909 that use the catchphrase. The phrase must have been everywhere to attract the postcard cartoonists. But looking up Ted Lewis informs me he would have been high school age at that time, and not at all a famous band leader. So somebody ELSE was making the phrase popular. No one will tell me about it; all sources simply say “Ted Lewis’s trademark phrase.”
Let’s close with a classic. I still can’t figure out this picture puzzle. It’s not a matter of the money—the prize must have vanished generations ago—or even, at this point, of pride. I never can figure out who the murderer was until the detective explains it to me and I would not care to see my win percentage on the daily Jumble. I just want to know. What IS this incredibly complex rebus trying to communicate? No, I KNOW it isn’t going to be worth the trouble. Why should THIS postcard mystery be different?
Blogsy Babbles 