Judge, 1928-11-17 · page 11 of 36
Judge — November 17, 1928 — page 11: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# "Why Sea Captains are Called Skippers" This is a humorous origin story disguised as serious historical inquiry. The joke is the entire premise: the author claims to explain why sea captains are called "skippers," but the explanation is purely absurdist wordplay rather than actual etymology. The story concerns Hiram Skipper, a retired captain who gives his son Eric two "barks" for his twenty-first birthday—a ship and a literal beating ("bark on the shins"). Eric sails to the fictional "Nostalgia" seeking snork eggs, fails, returns with hen eggs instead. The punchlines are deliberate groans: puns on nautical terms ("wow" = bark, "tiller girls" for winches, "leaning to port"). The satirical target appears to be *pseudo-intellectual magazine filler*—articles pretending to answer trivial questions with false scholarly authority. The cartoons show Eric's incompetent voyage, mocking adventure narratives. This is light humor for Judge's readers, poking fun at the magazine's own tendency toward elaborate nonsense presented as fact.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
After many weary months of exhaustive research, due partly to poison hooch, I am glad to be able to present to Jupar readers the interesting narrative that clears up the age-old question, “Why are sea captains called skippers?” Well, I can’t help it if you've never heard the question; there it is in black and whit “Why are sea captains called skippers so stop fooling around and let's delve into this pun-gent bit of sea lore that gets lore and lore as we proceed. In 1483, Hiram Skipper, a re- tired English sea captain, gave his son Eric two barks for his twenty-first birthday (one was a boat; the other was on the shins) and told him to go away to sea. “See what?” said Eric, which will give you a rough idea of Eric. The boat had a “bow,” of course, and was a “wow'’—hence the name bark—but it was so small that it was more of a growl than a bark. Eric, however, had it christened the Smith and set sail for Nostalgia with a small crew of 449 hands. (This means, of course, 225 men; one of them had had an arm shot off in the wa I might pause to explain that the “S-S.” did not stand for ‘“steam- ship” as same had not been in- vented at that time. History merely tells us that Eric stuttered while christening the craft. Leaning to port . Figure it out for yourself.) JUDGE Skippers By Gurney “First Mate” Williams Ss \. Photos from the Private Collec- tion of George “Gob” Lichtenstein Eric’s idea was to reach Nos- talgia, load the boat with a cargo of Nostalgian snork eggs and bring them back to America as a new breakfast delicacy. He and his crew, however, scoured, combed and shampooed Nostal, for three months without sceing a single snork, let alone the egg of onc, so they finally loaded the bark with hens’ eggs and headed back for the Land of the Free (America). It was a rough and perilous — ~~ Why Sea Captains are Called Captain Skipper at the tender age of fifty-four. journey, fraught with the dangers of many a storm, and Eric's ex- treme fortitude was given a se- vere test, what with near mutiny and the boredom of a long voyage and all, There were a couple of winches on the boat, but they re- fused absolutely to have anything to do with the sailors and spent most of their time steering the boat. They came to be known as the tiller girls and you can finish this crack yourself, (Continued on page 23) Notr—Captain Skipper is to be seen lying in the crow’s nest. comicbooks.com