As you may recall from our last thrilling episode, we were discussing the Women Driver Joke. I was noting that there are mighty few traces of that sort of traditional male humor among my inventory of comic postcards. In fact, in THAT column, I showed how many early cards I have which show perfectly competent and cheerful women driving their horseless carriages. But, of course, as anyone who has ever owned such a contraption can tell you, the operation of an automobile is not always smooth and carefree.
Even those who drive well and say their prayers by night may wind up needing to have their Fordrolet repaired. Women would do so just as often as men, but they had difficulties with mechanics that men didn’t encounter.
Usually, in any case. There IS card in my array which shows a man, not a woman, encountering a mechanic who went a little too far and applied an oil gun precisely where the customer did not expect it. Perhaps that gag was too suggestive to be applied to a female driver.
Out on the road, of course, there are other hazards. It didn’t matter whether the driver was a man or a woman if the traffic cop decided to write out a ticket.
Here, too, of course, there were dangers for the woman driver that her male counterpart did not encounter. (On postcards for general consumption, of course. Those little comic books sold under the table in grundgy little shops are another matter.)
But the number of postcards showing us Woman Drivers being a hazard, or even annoyance, to others is teeny. If I were doing this column as a collection of Fine Old Jokes about women drivers, it would not be easy to illustrate.
There are, certainly, postcards featuring lady drivers involved in accidents. But we are not told that this was HER fault.
In fact, we could say, investigating these accidents, that the woman driver usually comes out on top. (What? Oh, very well. I WON’T say it, then.)
Now here we have a young lady who is decidedly a hazard, at least to her passenger. But unless she’s going over the speed limit, I can’t see that this is HER fault as a woman driver. (True, at this point in automotive history, very few men had ponytails, but still, not exactly a Woman Driver Joke.)
And THIS cartoonist is blaming nothing on the lady’s driving. If anything, this is the fault of a distracted driver behind her. (AND an artist who needed some leg art to improve sales.)
In fact, the only reliable joke to come in about women in automobiles is THIS gag, which puts her in another seat. And even then, I have several versions of this which do not specify that the backseat driver is a woman. In fact…well, we can do the history of the Backseat Driver gag in a whole nother blog. We’ve reached the end of the road on this one.
