Judge, 1927-06-11 · page 35 of 36
Judge — June 11, 1927 — page 35: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a Judge magazine advertisement disguised as satirical fiction, promoting a subscription service. The story mocks sheltered young women, particularly those raised without exposure to modern culture. Erminie loses her popularity because she's ignorant of contemporary social norms—smoking, drinking laws, and current events—due to her father's strict censorship (he forbade her reading the *Saturday Evening Post*). The satire targets two audiences: it ridicules outdated parental control while simultaneously promoting Judge magazine itself as the solution. The punchline reveals that reading Judge taught Erminie how to fit into "modern generation" society, making her confident enough to marry an engineer. The coupon below transforms the joke into a direct pitch: readers who want to be "popular" and "live in your own generation" should subscribe to Judge's weekly installments. It's self-promotional satire—using comedy about generational disconnect to sell subscriptions to readers anxious about staying current with modern life.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
She Couldn’t Understand It! HEN Erminie was a little girl and papa still ran the brewery she had been the most popular girl on the avenue. Ice cream socials! Sleigh rides! Taffy pulls! And what fun they were, too! Hundreds of young men used to stand in line at her front door loaded down with candy and rubies and diamonds. Night after night she held high revelry over the checker-board and the kitchen sink. But suddenly they began to drop aw No one called on her. No one came to see her. She couldn't understand it! What was wrong with her? Poor girl—she didn’t know that girls smoked cigarettes or that there was a compulsory drinking law—no wonder her friends left her! It wasn't her fault because, unfortu- nately, when she was a little girl her father had discovered her reading the Saturday Evening Post in the attic, and he scolded her so that after that she read nothing but poetry and the funny paper. She Didn’t Know! At iast in desperation she plunged into the night and got a job as hat check girl on a Staten Island ferry. One night a passenger left a mag- azine on the hatrack. Its unusual appearance attracted the guileless eye of Erminie. All that night she sat on the top deck reading it. After COUPON JUDGE PUBLISHING COMPANY 627 West 43d St., New York I like the modern generation. Send me Jupce for: $5.00 O 2.00 O 7.80 0 Name Address City State that it was easy. The very next day she went down into the engine room and proposed to the engineer, who later married her. Erminie (snapped lounging in the vestibule of her Long Island Pullman) sa “My only regret is that I didn’t discover Judge sooner.” Do you, too, want to be popular? Do you want to live in your own generation—talk on equal terms with it? Send the coupon for our course of instruction in weekly in- stallments and we guarantee an amusing future, if not a past. comicbooks.com