Dr. Cupid

   Once upon a time, starting in 1879, there lived a cartoonist named Walter Wellman.  He was not a cartoonist yet when he was born, in 1879, that is to say.  He probably wasn’t allowed access to ink until he was able to crawl around and grab it./  Anyhow, he was one of those cartoonists who was already drawing for his college newspapers, and was probably drawing in the margins of his notebooks in earlier years as well.

    The golden age of postcards started when Walter was in his late 20s, and it proved to be a gold mine for a talented artist who didn’t like to be pinned down to a job where he had to have a comic strip for each day’s edition, or continue the same characters over a period of years.  This is not to say that he was incapable of doing a series or a comic strip.  He did one long series of postcards in which a story was told in three panels, each of which contained just one word (and the three words rhymed, making him a pioneer in flash poetry.)

    Among his most popular series was one h produced just at the start of the Golden Age, in 1908, as the United States announced one whole side of a postcard could be for the picture alone.  It proved so popular that it served as the basis of a silent movie in 1918.  These were the adventures of Dan Cupid, M.D., who went through the world dispensing, well, a certain kind of medical advice.

            At first glance, the jokes are jolly, and fairly obvious.  What you may have skipped over, in your hurry to get to the punchline, is all the detail that went in here.  Throughout the series, Dr. Cupid’s posture and expression count, and there is usually a counterpoint in the sampler hanging on the wall.  The patients are not all the same, nor are the prescriptions, but they do follow a pattern.  The patient is generally a rather foolish young man, while the prescription—or fellow patient—is generally elegant.  It will be noticed that Walter was a keen satirist of female fashion, and I’m sure you noticed something immediately about the young lady above.  This was, in fact, his trademark, and appeared on the backs of many of his cards as a sort of brand name.

    Yes, the ladies always had that massive pile of hair

    Note also that Dr. Cupid’s invoice changes from case to case as well, ranging from relatively modest

    To higher prices in critical cases

    He made house calls even outdoors

    And was not afraid to prescribe drastic remedies

    I, personally, think some of his plans sound a little dangerous, but a medical career is not for the timid.

    I have not been able to track down just how many postcards appeared in the Dan Cupid series: I have seen about two dozen, counting the ones I have here and others for sale at random around the Interwebs.  And, of course, he did other series as well.  Besides the three-act dramas mentioned above, there was his Black Hand series, which parodied sensational fiction and the national scare over an early crime syndicate of that name.

    And he continued in the business for many years, always keeping an eye on feminine fashion, and perhaps—I say perhaps—detailing his new ideal of 1930s womanhood, who does not look a LOT like the high-haired beauties of yore

Broad Humor

    I wrote a whole book once of jokes singled out for their absolute omnipresence, what a layperson might call “old jokes”, or, if they were people were as old as the jokes, “chestnuts”.  The book was presented in the form of a quiz: if the jokes were really all that stale, you would be able to fill in the blank I left for the punchline.  I made the point that telling a joke where everyone can see the punchline coming can have its own uses: you can groan or sigh FOR the audience as you reach the punchline, you can come up with a new punchline and surprise the audience, you can come up with a counterpunchline, building on the expected line.

    Or, if you wanted to go for the easy prize, you could just tell the joke and hope you told it better than anyone else, and that even if everyone had heard it before, they’d be pleased to find an old friend being treated with respect, and let you get a cheap laugh.

    In none of this was there any consideration of who came up with the joke, or could be considered its author.  This was an era of common knowledge jokes and comedians who used jokes to produce what was called an act.  This is now looked down upon as an inferior art form to what comedians do NOW, which is form their acts out of the very stuff of life and make you laugh at your shared experiences.  GOOD material, thus, is material which could not be used by any other comedian, as it would not come out of their life experiences, and thus sound false.  I blame the Sixties and the coming of the Singer-Songwriter to replace a generation of singers who sang whatever song they thought sounded good when they sang it.  (The top ten lists of those days would list a song and then the fourteen or fifteen different artists who had recorded it.)

    I am, myself, old school, or as I like to say it, one of the Bennett Cerf school of jokes, with an attitude of “Who CARES who told it first?”  (Bennett Cerf, for those unfamiliar with him, was a star editor at random House who produced joke books on the side.  Someone whose name I’ve forgotten said of him “Bennett Cerf is a comedian the way Willie Sutton is a banker”, referring to the famous bank robber.)

    I am also a student of old jokes, as mentioned before, and thought I would look over a few postcard artists who dealt with the same joke, but gave it enough of a spin (they hoped) to make it look new.  The joke involved here is demonstrated in the postcard at the top of this column, which gets points for A) giving us an action shot at the station and B) adding the joke about “background” to the gag, which most of our artists did not.

    This is the basic form of the gag as seen in most postcards: a lady in an ice cream parlor confiding her philosophy to a friend.  She is cheerful, and the cartoonist has not winked at us from behind the cartoon by having the soda jerk or the companion smile knowingly at us.  AND she takes up only one stool, though the way she’s sitting makes it look hazardous.

    This lady, however, is calmly taking up TWO stools, with a smile as big as…her personality.  I think the cartoonist has backed off from the joke a little too much, since though the counter man’s face is deadpan enough to reinforce what she has just said, she has apparently ordered only coffee, shaking our faith in her travel experiences.  The cartoonist has also hobbled his joke by having travel broaden one’s KNOWLEDGE, which is not what’s being drawn here.

    THIS lady, however, though she is also getting only coffee, gets a thorough smirk from the counter help AND trembling commentary from the two stools she is sitting on.  She is obviously related to women in other postcards with different jokes, like “Three Stool Fanny” or “I Have Such an Awful Hangover”.

    And here is the broadest expression of the joke, where I will contradict myself by removing a point for taking us out of the café.  I don’t think much of the artist’s style here, but I have to admit it’s one of the simplest forms of the joke, whatever else I think of the forms involved.

    I hope I have broadened your knowledge of well-traveled jokes.  If I get desperate, I may present a chapter or two from my bygone joke quiz, and you can see what else you already knew.

Bygone Wishes II

    Now in our last thrilling episode, we covered a forgotten postcard custom, that of sending postcards with pigs on them to wish someone a happy and prosperous new year.  I regret that we only scratched the surface  of the subject, as those pigs are legion, and could be found engaged in dozens of different activities, from opening champagne bottles at midnight to having their smiling heads served on a platter.  How this all signified the same good wishes is beyond me, but I did say it was a forgotten custom, didn’t I/

     Postcards also brought me to an awareness of another holiday tradition which is not so much forgotten as less worldwide in nature.  And that is sending good wishes to your friends on April Fool’s Day  The first of April served as a combination first day of spring and new Year’s Day for much of the world, a day when the winter underwear could be discarded and nice clothes could be worn again.  (In some parts of the world, this was considered foolhardy.  In England, as noted in the oft-censored poem, the first of May is considered more springlike.)  For generations, people celebrated New year’s Day on or around March 25, and there are tales that when certain kings ordered their people to celebrate the first of January as New Year’s Day, the poor souls put on their best spring clothes and went out to dance and were mowed down by the hundreds by frostbite.  This is not, apparently, where the whole April Fool’s custom came from, but it may have been a contributing factor.

    In any case, in France, the first of April included both practical jokes AND good wishes, and both of these involved fish.  Fish became so inseparable from April 1 that to this day, if you fall for a joke on that day, you will not hear “April Fool!” but instead “{posspn d’April!” or “April Fish!  The prankster may well tape a paper fish to your back as another sign of how you were fooled.”

    Fish, however,likre pigs, are considered a reliable food source, though, so they communicate good wishes as well.  Chocolate fish are a frequent gift on April 1, as are cookies or cakes which are similarly flounder-formed.  And, naturally, there had to be postcards.

    Fish and/or people on these cards indulged in a variety of escapades: fish were as likely to be seen canoeing as swimming, and people carried fish, created bouquets of fish, left fish as calling cards, caught fish, or cooked fish.  They seldom appeared on the cards actually eating the fish, though this favor was not returned by the fish

    Some of these cards could be grand and glorious art nouveau fantasy creations, or just salutes to the technology of the age.

    But more often, a deadpan acceptance of a surreal holiday was simply accepted.

    Children were often combined with fish, but sometimes even the most fake-looking fish seemed to displease them.  (The poem suggests the sender of the card is simply overcome with emotion at the thought of you.)

    At other times, they were proud of their errand.

    Or impressed with the sweetness of the sentiments.

    This is a mere sampling of the fish stories available on bygone April First cards.  As noted, the custom of Poissons d’April is still strong in France, though, as in other parts of the world, the postcards are far less common now./  But this is merely another example of what we lose with the passage of time.  It’s entirely natural, so it does no good to carp about it.

Bygone Wishes

    One of the things people do not talk about when studying serious history are the little pleasures and customs of life which have faded away.  This is left to people who write mere nostalgia: a loving look back on such disappearing pleasures as the key you had to use to open canned meat or those metal ice cube trays with the recalcitrant lever which might suddenly spread ice all over the kitchen…no, wait.  Those are ANNOYANCES of days gone by.  Still, that’s the sort of thing I mean.

    One of the customs I have observed in looking through aged postcards is that there used to be quite a busy custom of sending your friends cards wishing them luck at new Year’s.  This has faded away in part because the old style postal service, which could deliver your postcard across town and bring you a reply on the same day, is now gone.  Another is that with people spending a billion or so each year on Christmas cards, a New Year’s card seems superfluous, especially to those with hyper-extended bank accounts.

    Still, once upon a time, New Year’s was considered a much larger holiday than we consider it.  In some parts of the world, Christmas was considered a nice little holiday for the kids, while grown-ups had THEIR big day on new year’s.  It was a day for drinking, yes, as we observe it these days,

    but it was also a day for greeting your customers and creditors, and for dropping in to visit your friends.  There was a whole set of rules for what the hair color of the first person to cross your doorstep on new Year’s meant.  And above all else, it was a day for wishing each other good luck in the year to come.

    So New Year’s postcards are generally laden with good luck symbols, some of which we recognize today—four-leaf clovers or horseshoes—and some of which make us blink—chimney sweeps (think Mary Poppins) or black cats.  And above all else, there were pigs.

    To our ancestors, many of whom lived far closer to the land than we even understand now, a pig was a sign of prosperity.  A pig was like a savings account: you put things into it and eventually you reaped a profit in bacon, ham, and other useful comestibles. 

    The pigs on the postcards don’t seem to KNOW this.  They are perfectly happy bringing good luck to all, whether they arrive on foot, on a sled, on an airplane, or on a zeppelin.  (There are cards where jovial souls are dropping horseshoes and shamrocks AND pigs from airships, without thought of bringing anyone anything but luck.

    Luck and/or prosperity are intended by all these postcard greetings.  Some of these children, by the way, seem to have made their living posing with pigs, intoxicated or otherwise, and somewhere there were apparently artists who did good business in papier-mache pigs.  Millions of these pigs were distributed in the first decades of this century, and in some parts of Europe, the custom continued until postcards themselves started to fade away in the 1970s.  A piggy grazing among fly agaric mushrooms and/or piles of gold, was the perfect announcement that 1941 was here, and all would be smooth sailing for the coming year.

Swizzle or Swag

    I was going to write about something completely different today, but I was transfixed by one of those momentous question which can change a country’s entire culture.  You know the sort of thing: the little spur of the moment butterfly cough that can derail whole civilizations and send them spiralling toward doom or greatness.

    So why do some mixed drinks have to include a paper umbrella?

    Yes, I know.  You are amazed that someone who spends most of his time on trivia about Dutch kids on postcards could tackle a philosophical point of such magnitude.  But every now and then you have to push the boat into deep waters.  (Water not necessarily being the point here, of course.)

    A few people seem to feel that the umbrella, often seen in drinks consumed in a beachfront area, provide important shade for the beverage.  A lot of these drinks are chilled, and/or contain ice cubes, so naturally you want to keep the sun off them.  That doesn’t exactly work, of course, because what’s melting the ice is the heat around the glass: your sweaty palms or the humid atmosphere.  A few other people pooh-pooh the whole ice cube theory, saying that the umbrella provides a cover to keep alcohol fumes from evaporating too quickly.  In this theory, the fumes are forced back down into the beverage enhancing the booze content.  Food scientists love this theory: they didn’t think anybody could come up with something sillier than the ice cube theory.

    An expert I asked about this said, “They have umbrellas because they have tropical names.”  There’s a lot of sense to this.  The paper umbrella business boomed about the same time the tiki craze swept the nation, though this involves us in a separate debate over what constitutes a tiki drink.  A tiki drink, according to purists, must be primarily rum and tropical fruit juice.  And, to make it worse, some tiki drinks are served with umbrellas and some are not, while some drinks with umbrellas do not fit the definition of tiki drink.  None of this negates the original thought, however: tropical drink equals umbrella.

    Another theory makes it a simple marketing tool to get women to come to bars.  The old style neighborhood bar was a men’s establishment, according to this theory.  Women and even children might show up, but only to buy beer to take home for the family.  Only men hung around the bar drinking until all hours, and a number of bartenders realized they could double the take if women could be coaxed into the place.  (Or tripled, as men who didn’t want to go to bars to drink might show up to meet women.)  What would bring women into these rugged all-male spots with spittoons on the floor and pig’s knuckles on the free ,lunch counter?  Why, little paper umbrellas, of course!  So in the 1930s, a bunch of bars got together and decided….I am still getting my head around this story, and I will get back to you when I figure it out.  Mind you, there IS a belief that any drink with an umbrella in it is a Girlie Drink.  It’s the fruit juice.)

    My personal favorite is the theory that the umbrella is there as a hiding place for the Tiki Drink Demon, who hides there and whispers “It’s full of fruit juice!  It’s healthy!  You’re getting healthy food with your alcohol.  Better get another one!”  Some purveyors of this theory suggest the demon is really the spirit of Don the beachcomber or Trader Vic, whichever one of those gentlemen you feel is the inventor of the umbrella-clad beverage.

    You can, of course, probably come up with an alternate theory that beats all of these.  Don’t just make one up, though.  Making up stories about paper umbrellas is a shady proposition.  (Sorry.  I get giddy when away from the postcards.)

The Yocks of Yesteryear

    While I am waiting around for customers to make use of my new consulting firm, I would like to establish my claim to be an evaluator of old pop culture things.  There must be plenty of people out there whose grandfather left them a stack of old books, or old newspaper clippings, or old magazines, and needs someone to come in and say “Yeah, those are prime recyclables” or “Do you realize you have a copy of the very first Bazooka Joe joke?”  Buy how would they know that uncle Blogsy knows his way around such stuff?

    So I thought I would just offer some more of my expertise as a student of really old jokes.  I gave been told that I am a specialist in these, even though I have not sought such acclaim.  (This acclaim, if you’ve never heard it, generally comes in the form of groans.  Weird sort if applause, but part of my job is knowing a tribute when I hear it.”

    We went into this just a little in our last outing, when we considered the joke craze which followed General MacArthur’s famous speech.  His quotation of “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away” led to the postcards we examined last time around, dealing with “Old Fishermen Never Die: They Just Smell That Way.”  But this was merely one of many, as pointed out at the time.  We would learn, as the years went by, that “Old Bartenders Never Die; They Just Tap Out”, “Old Pilots Never Die; They Just Move to a Higher Plane,” and even “Joan Crawford never died; She Just Faye Dunaway.”

    This was hardly the only joke craze to sweep the country.  Another one, though it can be traced to Shakespeare if you want to go to those lengths, really hit us at some point during the Great Depression, and has been depressing people ever since.  This was the Knock Knock joke, to which Captain Kangaroo gave a serious boost on his television show.  This requires a person who will play along, doing the second and fourth, or straight lines of such classics as “Knock Knock.  Who’s there?  Little Old lady.  Little Old lady Who?  I didn’t know you could yodel!”  Some of these rise to great narrative power, as in the Captain’s “Knock Knock.  Who’s there?  Ira.  Ira Who?  Ira ceived a gift from sister: it’s a duck that doesn’t quack.”  “Knock Knock.  Who’s there?  Herbert.  Herbert Who?  Well herbertday is tomorrow and I’m gonna give it back.”

    Wikipedia cites the L.N. Becker Company and its 1960s trading cards for nearly bringing on the downfall of the republic with a set of fifty trading cards bearing what they called “Elephant Jokes”.  The populace had no defense against being trampled by these, which aimed at sheer absurdity.  To this day, if you ask a friend, “How do you tell if an elephant is hiding in your refrigerator?” and explain “By the footprints in the mayonnaise.” they will sigh and turn away, knowing there is no support program for such as you.  If you’re lucky, someone will ask you “How do you get an elephant in your refrigerator?” and go on to say, before you can, “You just move the bowl of Jell-O to the second shelf”.  You have at least found a fellow elephantist.

   These jokes were aimed at all audiences, but there were other joke fads which were aimed more directly at the adult market (not TOO adult, as radio and television censors had their ears open,.)  Talk shows and comedians of the 1960s gave us the Cocktail Joke.  “It’s called a Heretic Cocktail.  Drink one and you get stoned.”  I find very few of these on the Interwebs, so this craze has possibly gone into remission, and no one claims to have originated them, but Johnny Carson and his cronies were probably responsible for plenty of them.  “It’s called the Corpse Cocktail.  Drink one and you’re laid out.”  I DID see someone post online “It’s the Johnson and Johnson Vaccine Cocktail.  You only need one shot.” but I don’t know if that shows this particular epidemic is on its way back.

    Also popular among the stand-up crowd was the wind-up doll joke.  I expect this has gone the way of wind-up toys and other pre-electronic playthings, but once it was everywhere.  “It’s the new Liz Taylor doll.  Wind it up and it gets married.”  “It’s a Teddy Kennedy doll.  Wind it up and it runs…for president.”  Sometimes, following technology, it turned into a pull the string doll, but the pull-the-string doll has also gone the way of all magic dragons.  Though once again, some sentimental old jokester did post “It’s the new Donald Trump doll.  Wind it up and it tells you you didn’t.”

    We haven’t even scratched the Little Willie joke, or the psychiatrist joke, , or…well, I see by the green around your gills that you’ve had enough, so I will pause until you’ve recovered.  After all, old jokesters never die; they just gag.

Fish Story

    Seventy years ago this spring, general Douglas MacArthur made his famous address to Congress, in which he reminded everyone that “Old Soldiers never die.  They just fade away.”  Though he was not the first to express the thought (it apparently comes from a song parody of around World War I) he made it his own in the drama of the moment.  AND he set off a joke craze.  Soon the world was filled with one liners based on it: “Old librarians never diel; they just check out” and “Old pilots never die; they ascend to a higher plane.”

    Since I had a record number of likes on my column comparing the postcard cartoonists and the unfortunate cow (I do not say a record HIGH number) I thought we might look at a few renditions of a gag which spread everywhere in the 1950s.  (If you check Wikipedia for information about the phrase “Old Soldiers, etc.”, this joke is specifically mentioned among those inspired by MacArthur.  I don’t suppose he’d feel flattered.)

    This version is prosaic, a mere picture of a fisherman about his crusade to save the world from being overpopulated by small fish.  He has not shaved in a few days, and he is wearing patched garments, but otherwise, there is nothing to emphasize the caption.

    This is no problem here.  We have added emanata, and now there is an audience to let us know exactly what they mean.  Having our onlooker (onsmeller?) be a skunk means we are receiving an expert opinion.  The fisherman himself is rather tidy, though: patched knees, perhaps, but otherwise rather trim and shipshape (dockshape?  How many words are we allowed to create in one column?)

    You will note that these happy fishermen do not have a LOT to show for their work.  This vacationer is happy to catch anything at all, and his kitten seems to feel his boots smell more interesting than those teeny fish just above her head.

    Of course, you don’t HAVE to catch anything big; this is another fisherman with a small catch who is explaining about the one who got away.  His puppy, however, again finds his boots smell more interesting than the actual fish he did catch.

    Now THIS fisherman is doing it right.  He is attracting flies, and repulsing a skunk, who is doing his best to get off this postcard.  Meanwhile, the cat has taken such an interest in the proceedings that he has devoured the first course of his fish dinner, and is thinking about the next.

    THIS fishing gentleman, however, obviously takes the gold in this competition.  Both a skunk and an outhouse are declaring his supremacy in the Stench Olympics, while the sun itself seems to have a clothespin on its nose, and flowers are wilting as he passes.  His shirt is missing a chunk, his pants are held up by a rope, and his hat and shoes have seen better days.  He has a catch he can be proud of, so much so that he isn’t going to tuck it away in a creel but carry it over his back, so the sun can bear down on it and impress his scruffy shirt with its odor.

    I have looked around the Interwebs, and I find that this joke has not faded away just yet, and although it is less available on modern postcards (modern postcards themselves being less available) you can find the sentiment on T-Shirts, coffee mugs, wall plaques, and bumper stickers.  And if you think these olfactory salutes are as distasteful as the joke about the unfortunate cow, at LEAST they developed THIS one, and not its competition “Old Fisherman never Die: They Just Can’t Raise Their Rod.”

Go Fourth

    If I have scared away my readership with the previous blogs this week, I now have a nice private moment to do something I was fairly certain I would never do.  There will thus be no witnesses, giving me plausible deniability if someone says “I saw you were reminiscing about the Fourth of July.”

    People start reminiscing about Christmases past about the time they hit twelve (Hey, remember when at least half your presents would be NON-erlecronic?) and they start reminiscing about New year’s Eves past when they hit thirty (Man, I used to be able to start partying at noon New Year’s Eve and not get done ‘til dawn on the second!)  But for over fifty years, I have listened to people recall their Fourth of Julys and these were invariably REALLY OLD people.  I will thus record my own reminiscences now, before I get that old, and no one will notice.

    We did not have a red, white, and blue menu.  Blue raspberry drinks had not reached our part of the country, by and large, so blue was difficult,.  But we made up for it on red, with dinner-plate sized slices of watermelon (with seeds, which we did NOT spit).

    We were always in the high school band, so we would dress in white T-shirts, red bandanas, and blue jeans and march through town.  This was a personal problem, as I gave up jeans as soon as I was old enough to make my feelings count. (See, back in those days, denim had to be broken in by wearing it, and until you’d worn it a dozen times or so, it was the consistency of a fiberglass board. I eventually owned ONE pair of denim jeans, just for Independence Day.)

   Our personal fireworks were limited to sparklers and occasionally a pointless object called a snake, which, when lit, expanded into a long black ropelike thing.  Sparklers, involving personal interaction with live fire, were way more exciting.  My mother handled fire anxieties at Christmas (Did you water the tree?  Don’t leave the lights on too long) but my father was in charge of that concession on the Fourth of July.  His main concern was the whereabouts of the family cat.  A few sparks could be the stuff of nightmares.  This never happened.  The family cats were a wise breed, and never came anywhere near us when we were waving fire around.  (I believe home movies exist of us trying to make stars and spell our names with sparklers, but like a lot of holiday doings, these were a lot more exciting to perform than to watch later on.

    Fireworks outside we rook for granted.  We didn’t need to get in the car to watch them; they came to us.  Our house was not far from the fairgrounds and our neighbors across the street had thoughtfully arranged their roofs and trees so as to frame the fireballs perfectly in the sky.

    There was SOME drama to the fireworks, as PBS came to town in my formative years, and there was invariably some big Fourth of July concert just at the time we would all be outside watching fireworks.  This was before the days of YouTube or even, really, the VCR, so if you missed either the live fireworks or the live television concert, you had missed it for goods.  This could call for frantic commutes from the living room to the front steps.

    During what I laughingly refer to as my maturity, the Fourth became just a day off in the last month toward the massive book festival I worked at the end of July: I concocted maps and lists while I watched The Longest Day (if these guys could manage to pull off D-Day, I could take care of a little shindig like ours.)  It made for a quiet weekend, sometimes the last quiet one before the fireworks of the Book Fair.

    This year I am planning to watch the Longest Day, and listen to the fireworks from my window.  My refrigerator would not even hold a watermelon these days, and I’m not sure I could, either.  The last sparklers I saw had been used as bookmarks, and I quickly tossed them away before library security could go on a search for explosives in the rest of the book donation.       

    But I certainly wish anybody out there a Fourth of July you can reminisce about when you are much, much older than I am now.

Such Is Life

    “Mister Farmer!  Mister Farmer!  How is it that your cow there has no horns?”

    “Well, Ma’am, cows and their horns are an interesting subject.  Sometimes a cow never grows horns at all.  The scientists are still working on why: it may be the Good Lord just never meant that cow to have ‘em.  Sometimes an animal is just so aggressive we have to remove the horns for the safety of everyone involved.  And sometimes a couple of animals will get to fighting, or there’ll be an accident, and one horn is damaged.  So we have to remove the other horn or just leave the cow to walk with its head lopsided.  Now, that particular cow doesn’t have any horns, Ma’am, because it happens to be a horse.”

    Our ancestors were more familiar with the animals than we are, simply because the line between city life and country life was not so finely drawn for them.  Plenty of city families kept animals around the place, and the rich, who didn’t need to keep a goat in order to get fresh milk, had country estates where they could learn what it was like to be nipped by a horse or have a foot stepped on by a cow. 

    There are hundreds of cow jokes on postcards out there in the world, and you may wonder why I headed the column with a rather distasteful one.  Well, it happens to be one of the most popular cow jokes around: something even a city slicker might understand at once.  I’m not sure that justifies…well, look what I found once I looked around.

    The cow at the top of this column seems simply to be thinking of the pity of it all, but not every animal in the gallery is so accepting.  This lass seems more angry than anything else: either she suspects someone of sneaking up behind her or she has just realized what has happened and is snapping at YOU for thinking anything is wrong in YOUR life.

    Whereas Bossy here is simply consumed with self-pity.  (Entirely understandable, as the artist has given her a pig’s ears and snout.)

    Old Bess is in the same pit of self-pity as her predecessor, but SHE had to cope with a cartoonist who wasn’t quite sure what a cow’s mouth looked like.

    The black and white postcard cartoonists tend to be basic: if their publisher couldn’t afford color, they wouldn’t pay for a lot of frills, either.  But at least this one could draw a mournful cow.

    This is the only concerned cow I’ve found with a sympathetic human onlooker, and I would like to know what was in the artist’s mind when he had this shapely farmer’s daughter leaning forward so her own…next slide, please.

    Back to full color, we find our cows getting more frantic: this one, I expect, because she’s so much TALLER than the others.

    Tears become more plentiful, and mouths are open wider as our cows object to the mindless cruelty of happenstance.  (By the way, just about every cattle raiser I ever knew used the word “cows” almost exclusively.  One told me, “We only call ‘em ‘cattle’ if we’re filling in government forms or throwing the bull ay a Cattleman’s Conference.”)

    We also see our herd becoming more cartoony, as in this case, where Mignonette here has had her problems made worse by her really huge feet.

    Whereas Mootilda, if you can tear your eyes from the basic joke, has truly impressive ears and tail tuft.

    And Buttercup has the head and physique of a Great Dane, which makes her predicament that much more painful.

    When it comes to trouble waiting to happen, and the symbol of what occurs in our daily lives, though, my vote is for Notelsie here.  She has tried to improve herself: those glasses help her when she goes to the library, and she’s obviously put in time at the gym.  For she is the only one of our cows who has stepped unfortunately with a forefoot, and not a hind hoof.  I am impressed by this cartoonist’s attention to detail, and wonder if he is commenting on life in another way, as his ambitious heroine is in serious pain, while his signature seems to form the handle of a farm implement which is at peace, content to be a hoe

    (“Mister Blogger, Mister Blogger, that last joke was a misstep.

    “That was the theme of the column, Ma’am.”

Four Cheap Old Comic Books III

    So It’s taken long enough to get here, and I warned you we won’t be studying the contents of any of them, but I just wanted to let you know what happened when I obtained, and actually read, these four Tijuana Bibles I found online.

    As a brief recap, and to bore you further, Tijuana Bibles are pornographic comic books produced between the 1930s and 1960s, generally the size of a postcard with eight cheaply reproduced pages between cheaply printed construction paper covers.  They frequently, though not always, exploited the names of celebrities, especially people whose names you’d have recognized from the movies or the newspaper comics pages.  (Those of you who just asked “What’s a newspaper?” or “What’s a comics page?” will stay after class for extra homework.)

    The first of the four is “Kathrine Hepbern in ‘Belle of the Hills”.  Spelling a celebrity’s name wrong is basic practice in any kind of parody, and it should not take you long to figure out this is supposed to involve movie icon Katharine Hepburn.  I have not traced a movie or play of hers that I can link with “Belle of the Hills”, but this has nothing to do, as far as I can tell, with what goes on in the book.  And neither does Katharine Hepburn, for that matter.  The face on the cover doesn’t look much like the great Kate at any point in her career, but somebody worked on it.  The pictures in side are basically just showing a man and a woman talking way too much about the eight different sexual positions they try out.  The chances that this was a generic couple and someone tried to increase sales by putting this cover on it strikes me as highly likely.

    This is not a possibility with “Patsy Kelly Gets Shot in the Ass With Romance”, a somewhat less subtle title than that used on most of the dirty little eight-pagers, which often tried to look as blameless as possible on the cover.  Here someone actually has made an effort to get the face of the celebrity right, and a little extra work went into the illustrations, in which the usual eight sex positions are presented with a little more flair, the dialogue shows a bit of wit, and the man is actually himself presented as a celebrity, the role being awarded to Ray Milland.  Ray Milland was a Hollywood stalwart and, by the by, one of those actors who was married to the same wife for over fifty years.  For those unfortunate enough to have missed her movies, Patsy Kelly was a stand-out second banana in motion pictures, frequently the only interesting character in many films, playing the wisecracking best friend, wisecracking waitress, wisecracking nurse, wisecracking secretary, etc.  She noted, in retirement (and film historians agree) that one of the two handicaps which kept her from making it as an A list comedian was her sex life, which was not much like the one depicted here.

    I hope the world has not descended far enough into the new century for me to have to explain the celebrities copied in “Thee Men In a Girl with the Marx Bros.”  This features eight scenes of a cartoon version of Groucho performing eight different ways with his unnamed co-star.  Chico moves in in one panel, and Harpo in another, but that’s the extent of their participation.  It should be noted that both of these brothers appear with their hats on, the cartoonist obviously feeling that only Groucho would be recognizable if completely naked.  (The face is easily worth using in other venues, though his cigar does not make an appearance.)  The dialogue makes an attempt to be worthy of Groucho, and works out pretty much the way it works whenever somebody tries to write Groucho dialogue.

    The foregoing may not lead you to expect much from “Peter B. Everhard presents Moon Mullins in ‘Help!’”  It is by far the best of the lot, however.  Maybe it wasn’t so difficult to draw Moon Mullins, who was a nationally known comic strip character, but this cartoonist has copied him very well.  Furthermore, there is a STORY: Moon approaches an exotic dancer performing in a circus side show and makes a proposition.  This is, in fact, exactly something the real Moon Mullins might have done.  A former professional boxer down on his luck, he spent a lot of his time in his comic strip ogling good-looking women and being rejected by them.  The cooch dancer, to giver her the title which would have been used at the time, feels a two dollar offer is decent pay, this being the Depression, and they retire to a back room where they spend the rest of the pages of the story having sex and insulting each other roundly.  (The prostitute and the customer who insult each other is a standard comedy routine, with two recorded versions in existence from the 1880s.)  This leads to one final payoff joke in the end (showing both partners dissatisfied) and the whole thing would actually have made for a complete Moon Mullins Sunday comic, in some other dimension.

    In all four books, the main interest nowadays are the celebrity impersonations by line drawing equivalents.  The sex, though graphic and  various, is not AS graphic or various as what you could find in three minutes on the Interwebs.  It’s nsfw and only for audiences we unblinkingly call “mature”, but hardly likely to distract someone who reads adult comics online.  Here and there competence sneaks in, though.  I don’t know whether I could have made my way through all fourteen I originally bid on, and there are, after all, hundreds of titles.

     By the way, to save time, a friend of mine has already sold these for me on the Interwebs, with the price realized by Patsy Kelly alone tripling what I spent to buy the four.  Good luck with your garage sale hunting.