Judge, 1913-01-11 · page 10 of 24
Judge — January 11, 1913 — page 10: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page from *Judge* contains several short humorous pieces satirizing early 20th-century American social behavior: **"Boys Who Should Be Suppressed"** mocks children who embarrass their families through tactlessness—asking about spoons at tea, boasting about mothers' false teeth, mocking older brothers' mustache attempts, or announcing financial embarrassments like furniture bought "on payments." The piece uses exaggerated rhetoric (comparing such boys to Carlyle's barrel-incased children) to satirize Victorian-era concerns with propriety and family reputation. **The remaining anecdotes** offer mild social comedy: a beach conversation about bathing suits, a definition joke about patent-medicine skepticism, a Kentucky dialect story about Woodrow Wilson's 1912 election victory (referencing the unusually large Democratic plurality), and a quip about temporary marriage. The cartoons are simple illustrations supporting these text pieces rather than standalone political commentary. The satire targets petit bourgeois anxieties about respectability and social standing rather than political figures.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Boys Who Should Be Suppressed. HOSE who persist in asking, ‘‘Whose spoons are them?"’ when their mothers are entertaining the minister and other friends at tea. Those who seem to think it a mat- ter of family pride because their mothers can take out all of their teeth and who insist on boasting of this accomplishment in the presence of company. Those who make unfeeling and jeering references in regard to the efforts of their older brothers to raise u mustache. This crime is doubled when this reference is made in the presence of the big brother's ‘‘girl.’” Those who have no more family pride than to blab. all over the neighborhood that the new parlor set is being purchased ‘‘on payments.”” Those who have the indecency to tell big sister’s waiting beau that she will be down as soon as she ‘‘gits her complexion all put on.”* Those who burst into the parlor, in the presence of callers, and announce that the butcher is at the back door, ‘kicking about his bill.’” The boy with tendencies of this kind, like others equally unlovable, is a blot on the family escutcheon, a discordant note in the symphony of family life, a rankling thorn in the family side, and he belongs to the class of boys Carlyle had in mind when he said that a boy should be incased in a barrel and fed through the bunghole until he had reached the age of twenty- one. —Max Merryman. Nothing To Brag About. A young man was strolling along the beach at Ven- ice, Cal., with his sweetheart, when the young lady in- troduced the subject of bathing suits, as follows: “Men are always jesting about the women’s bathing suits; but, for my part, I don’t see anything to brag about in the men’s suits here.’" ‘The young man glanced at scrawny man who was sun- ning himself on the sand and replied, “I don’t, either.’” A Rare Bird.‘ “Pop, what is askeptic?”’ “A skeptic, my son, is a person who can read a patent- medicine ad without feeling that he has any of the symp- toms described.’’ TO WHOM IS HE TELEPHONING? eS re A GOURMET'’S OPINION. “Gee! that 's a tantalizing smell o' cooking, Billy. Ye ‘re luchy ye got a cold." The Great Majority. Dvrine the period when everybody was talking about the election of Woodrow Wilson by a plurality un- heard of before in Democratic annals, a Kentucky moun- taineer came into the office of a lawyer in Winchester. The lawyer asked about a number of his acquaintances in the hills, and particularly about an old squire who was a judicial wonder in his way. He's dead," said the visitor solemnly, “Ah! joined the great majority, has he?’ sighed the lawyer. “Well, hardly that, I reckon, jedge,’’ replied the visitor, in perfect good faith, ‘seein’ ez how he never wuz a Democrat.”” A Social Condition. “Is she married?” “*Temporarily. comicbooks.com