Judge, 1935-05 · page 10 of 36
Judge — May 1935 — page 10: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# "Mistress Pepys' Journal" — Judge Magazine Satire This is a literary humor column by Baird Leonard mimicking Samuel Pepys's famous diary. The author, writing as "Mistress Pepys," complains about domestic frustrations: deciding dinner menus, unexpected visitors interrupting her siesta, and a telephone number confused with a neighboring theater's. The main satire targets **Emily Post**, the famous etiquette arbiter. A reader sends verses mocking Post's rigid formality rules—particularly her insistence that butter should be absent from formal dinners. The joke: at a dinner for President R. (likely Roosevelt) and his wife, there's actual butter and a butter-knife present, contradicting Post's strict protocols. The cartoon illustrates desert-island escapism—the author daydreaming of escape from these quotidian annoyances. This satirizes both rigid social conventions and the tedium of upper-middle-class domestic life circa the 1930s.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Judge Mistress Pepys’ Journal By Baird Leonard PRIL ina 1.—Awake book called betimes, reading “February Hill” by Victoria Lincoln, and one of the most adroit literary performances I have come across in some time. Upon finish- ing it, I did ponder, as always in such rare “Heavens, when will I find something else which is equally worth my attention?” and did reflect how much more absorbing are the do- ings of sinners than of saints, for no matter how eloquent are the injunctions of Milton to love Virtue because of her freedom, there is no gainsaying that Becky Sharp was better company than Amelia Sedley. Were I off for a desert instances, island, limited to a library of ten books, Ward Greene's “Cora Potts” would cer- tainly be one of them. Being off for a desert island, by the w would suit me splendidly at the moment, for not only am I fed up on deciding what to order for dinner and talking with unexpected visitors who interrupt my siesta, but I do feel as if [ should hurl myself out the window the next time [ answer the telephone and am asked what show is on for the afternoon and what time the curtain goes up, there being a similarity between our telephone number and tha of a neighboring theatre on an entir different exchange, which does indi “But tell him he’s got to press them now. I can’t sit here all day without my pants!” that the assumed infallibility of the dial system is baseless. By the first post a letter from E. A. Jacoby of Yonkers, enclosing, apropos of my philippics against the absence of butter at dinner parties, a picture of the Presi- dent’s place at the great feast ntly spread for him in Washington with all the trap- pings of formality, accompanied by the following lines entitled “The Arbiter Bites the Dust, or Mrs. Pepys Happy at Last” Let’s all shed a tear for poor Emily Post Whose etiquette’s always her pride and her boast; Like the famous young who's so utterly utter, She says that at “formals” shouldn't have butter. BUT At the dinner for President R. and his wife Is a plate with a roll and— good God !—butter-knife. (Page 24, please) man one comicbooks.com