comicbooks.com Join Free

Judge, 1919-11-29 · page 12 of 36

Judge — November 29, 1919 — page 12: what you’re looking at

📖 Open the full issue in the page-flip reader →
Judge — November 29, 1919 — page 12: Judge, 1919-11-29

What you’re looking at

# "Rather Low in Your Mind? This Way, Please!" — Judge Magazine Satire This satirical piece mocks the early 20th-century craze for self-improvement schemes and pseudo-scientific "mental recharging" services. The cartoon depicts a fictional business offering to boost customers' intellectual capacity through dubious treatments—measuring mental "battery" levels (numbered 1300 = par), offering recharging stations, or even replacing brains entirely. The satire targets intellectually exhausted elites worn down by tedious social obligations, difficult modernist literature (Bergson, Gertrude Stein, Walter Pater), and dull cultural events. The joke: desperate people will pay for absurd solutions promising quick mental refreshment—restored wit, humor appreciation, and social sparkle. By illustrating caricatured "before and after" faces and depicting this as a genuine service, author Orson Lowell ridicules both the gullibility of the wealthy and the era's obsession with quantifying and mechanically "fixing" human intelligence and personality.

📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Tur Rather Low in Your Mind? This Way, Please! By Orson CZ Tiren Business Man ano His Wive-Awake, = LoweL. Physiological Maps by the Author ZADS recharged and brought up to par. Recharging stations in every town. That's the Big Idea. Somewhat at sea in your reading of Bergson, the nourishment offered. With the continual round of dull dinners, dull plays, stupid books, and the colorless people with Perry Wire x Tre Dean AND THE QUICK, AS inability Quickexeo sy Our Process inabilit new movements, rather gropeful than hopeful i in your delving in the classics? The “Law of Psychic Phenomena” sort of kills the life out of you, what? Well, thei : YOU NEED US! says their ad- vertisement at the top. The insulting pups! Neverthele: e think they've got a good thing, which is going to make attendance at the human race- track mone of a pleasure. Call at our office. We will test out your mental battery. 1300 is par. 1275 is good. 1200is poor. Anything below 1100 indicates that unless some- thing is done at once the battery will cease to function, Many owners think a brisk course of mental activity will in itself recharge and bring the brain up to normal; this is sometimes true, but it is a fatiguing process at best, time consuming and expensive. A lady who later became a patron of ours tried this, but after attending a course of twelve Rabindrinath Ta- whom one is forced to meet and mix at depress- ing receptions and other functions, the grey matter becomes darker and dark- or Gertrude Stein? An cope with “My advice would be to leave the bean with us. It may take a gore lectures at $3 each, os Numoer 1015 ano Nusper 1325 er, a dull, sooty black; examination after recharging shows the intellectu- als again a rich, rosy grey; at 1325, and at a trifling additional cost, a beautiful lavend greatly in vogue with the ladies this season, is obtained, enabling one to appreciate even the dullest of our modern novelists, to comprehend the verses of the advanced poets, see points of jokes hidden to many, grasp the delicate, elusive flavor of double entendre—see much humor and sprightliness in plays and skits where perhaps little really exists. Could aught be simpler? You drop in, they test you out; if recharging seems advisable, they will hook you up to the dynamo or dingus that does the work (they do not name it in the advertisement) and do it while you wait, or they will unscrew your head, put in a new brain to use until your own is ready, and screw you up again. “Friday, 4 P. M.”, reads the card the own is ready, screw you up again the absurdly small fee and 4 ‘A A Pro-Cottece Prorrssor WHo Was Saven 11-29-19 and reading four volumes of Walter Pater, she found the reading of her mental battery had gone up from 1100 to only 125, due perhaps, in part, to the fact that her mind had become so weakened as to be unable to take on 1z walk out with the jolly old bean housing practi- cally a brand new suite of furniture. There you go briskly up the avenue, wearing a bright, peppy expression, with a merry quip here, a jest there, a snappy come-back which e-Marps SApottoer comicbooks.comm