Judge, 1926-04-10 · page 28 of 36
Judge — April 10, 1926 — page 28: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This humorous story satirizes a newspaper columnist (likely a "wise-cracker" or joke writer) who was killed by his exasperated wife. The satire targets two specific things: 1. **Repetitive joke-writing**: The columnist constantly mines his own life for material, subjecting his wife to endless puns and forced wordplay at breakfast. He won't engage in genuine conversation—he just scribbles observations for his column. 2. **The "Abie's Irish Rose" joke**: His final, fatal wisecrack involves calling the play "The Jew's Harp" (a pun on the musical instrument) and then explaining it as a reference to "Abie's Irish Rose"—a popular 1920s play about interfaith romance. The wife, driven mad by years of this relentless comedic exploitation, finally kills him. The joke mocks both the columnist's mechanical humor-extraction and the dated, exhausted state of that particular reference by the time this was published. The verdict is effectively that some jokes deserve a death sentence.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
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