For reasons we needn’t go into, the above has never been one of my favorite gags. But I believe it helps illustrate that our ancestors were not as shy about sex as we like to believe. (As noted hereintofore, that’s how they got to be ancestors.) This is a joke which makes absolutely no punchline without the naughty subtext. And it wasn’t just the 1950s that saw this phenomenon.
You can tell from the ladies’ garments that this postcard comes from a generation before those aging cattle. It may just be my modern imagination that makes me hunt for any sign of a wedding ring on the finger of the “successful” rival, the joke nonetheless depends on an understanding of the potential side effects of romance.
We need to set up the next example a bit. Here we see a completely proper situation. Nothing is going on here beyond a little too much kissing and an irate parent who has grabbed up a handy slat or club to break it up. Anyone who grew up with chaperones could chuckle at this without blushing.
It may be just OUR generation who would blush at this, I suppose. The era before World War I was used to schoolmasters in loco parentis (“in place of parents”, essential in a boarding school or college where a kid’s natural parents weren’t around) AND the liberal use of the cane. And yet our cartoonist has spent extra time emphasizing the targets available on the couple. This could have been just to make sure we knew who was going to be the butt of the joke.
The arcade card, which was postcard-sized and sometimes included postcard markings on the backside for mailing, was for people visiting penny arcades, and could feature cute kitties, song lyrics, movie stars, and adult humor. This example, from the 1930s or thereabouts, would have been available at random from a machine offering naughty jokes for a penny. I have encountered examples where people addressed and stamped these without needing the company to print the postcard marks, but you needed to know what your local postmaster would allow.
Polly’s arcade cards date from about twenty years before Mr. Wickersham’s acrobatic bedroom, and delight in accidental naughtiness. Her remarks could be perfectly unobjectionable if we weren’t aware that this scene wouldn’t even BE on an arcade card without another interpretation.
She malapropped through a number of appearances (this one depends on you knowing that ‘humping’ is also slang of ‘doing a lot of work.”) Because no research is too difficult for my readers (both of you) I have tracked down two further appearances. Polly appears in a butcher shop in one, bemoaning the fact that prices of meat have gone so high that her husband will have to be satisfied with a piece of tail, while on the other she covers in four lines a classic routine that could take four minutes on shellac discs sold under the counter at record stores. (ahem “I think if I sit on it,” said pretty Polly Prim, “And you push a little harder, you’ll be sure to get it in.” He is, of course, shoving a key into a suitcase. What did you think? You were supposed to.)
But naughtiness was not restricted to arcade cards. Here we have a genuine postcard which could be sent through the mails in the 1930s by people who could always argue that THEY thought it was just about gambling. This one wasn’t; it probably belonged to someone who explained to her parents that this was just the sort of thing to amuse Jack at college, and then quietly slipped it into her album. Never underestimate your ancestors.
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