Judge, 1913-11-01 · page 10 of 24
Judge — November 1, 1913 — page 10: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This Judge magazine page contains three separate satirical pieces from the early 1900s: **"November"** is a humorous essay by John Northern Hilliard about the month's melancholy nature—falling leaves, cold weather, heating costs, and butchers' price increases. It's genteel period humor about seasonal complaints. **"Dominant"** is a one-liner joke about marital dynamics: a woman asking if another succeeded in "breaking her husband's will" (controlling him), with the response that she did so long before he died—a dig at wives' perceived dominance. **"Lunch-Counter Mathematics"** mocks a waitress's confused arithmetic while tallying a diner's order, playing on working-class speech patterns and service-industry incompetence for laughs. Additional sections include vocabulary humor ("Nine Parts of Speech") and brief satirical definitions of character types—the uninteresting conversationalist, the deceptive stock promoter—typical Judge fare offering social commentary through witty observations of contemporary life.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
November By JOHN NORTHERN HILLIARD ‘THE MELANCHOLY days have come, of which the poet sings—the days of woolen underwear and other solemn things. The leaves have fallen from the trees, the sumac's lost its hue; the tur- key’s being fattened, for Thanksgiving’s almost due, The ducks and geese hike overhead, forsaking marsh and lake; the frost is on the pumpkin and the buck- wheat’s in the cake. A purple haze is on the hills, and in the valleys eke; the furnace gobbles up the coal, the pipes are on the leak. The gasman dreams of bigger bills, the butcher’s prices soar; the football oaf is on the field, in quest of human gore, and—— But what's the use? November is a melancholy month. The skies. they are DOMINANT Cynthia—Did Mrs. Gaywidow ever succeed in breaking her busband’s will? Mrs, Enright—Ob, yes ; long before be died. ashy and sober, and the wind wails eerily o’ nights. There are some good points about November, of course, for no month can be wholly bad, even as no month can be wholly good. For one thing, pumpkin pies bloom in November, and apple but- ter is at its perihelion. For another, the nuptial rites of Mr. P. Ork Sausage and Miss Buckwheat Kake are celebrated in November. Thirdly, it is the month that made the Puritans famous. But this is LUNCH-COUNTER MATHEMATICS Waitress (fortissimo) —Two three minute in the shell that 's four. two that 's three | One tenderloin, that 's two, roly-poly about all that can be said in favor of the eleventh month. The good points do not overbalance the bad. We eat too much pumpkin pie and partake too liberally of apple butter. We are unwisely fond of the sturdy buckwheat cake and the portly sausage. We gormandize on Thanksgiv- ing, and the pneumogastric nerve tor- tures us for many weary days and sleep- less nights. Ah, yes—— The melancholy days have come, of which the poet sings, of wail- ing winds and cloudy skies and other mournful things. Nine Parts of Speech Broken English. Pieces of poetry. Bits of rhetoric. Grammatical particles. Fragmentary remarks. Imperfect tenses. Split infinitives. Clipped sentences. Scraps of conversation. —Geo. B. Morewood. Suspicion “Everybody except his wife considers him an interesting conversationalist. I wonder why she doesn’t.’” * “Because he never talks in his sleep.’’ Begpuiling Beware the promoter! His talk is as gilt-edged and allur- ing as the engraved certificate of stock—and as worthless. comicbooks.com