Life, 1922-08-03 · page 8 of 36
Life — August 3, 1922 — page 8: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
The cartoon shows three men dining together, with the caption joke: "Wadda they call the French national anthem?" / "Oh—the Mayonnaise or sumphin'." This is a crude ethnic/linguistic joke mocking both French culture and working-class American dialect. The humor relies on a pun: "Mayonnaise" sounds like "La Marseillaise" (France's actual national anthem) to an ear unfamiliar with French, and the misspelled response ("sumphin'") mimics lower-class American speech patterns. The facing articles include satirical commentary on social issues: "The Cause of Crime" humorously blames women's short skirts, female smoking, and other modern behaviors, while "Aquatic Tennis" appears to be a humorous account of sporting events at Wimbledon in July 1922.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
“Wadda they call the French national anthem?” “Oh—the Mayonnaise or sumpthin’.” The Cause of Crime N eminent divine declares that the reason we have so much crime in this country is that women wear short skirts. All the ills to which the modern flesh is heir can be accounted for as simply, if one will only stop to give the matter a little thought. The trouble with us is, we do not study intensively our sociological problems ; we do not think deeply of our civic, state and Federal difficulties. We Effect Jams in the subway..............- Highway Robbery . Arson Homicide . Disorderly Conduct .. Bolshevism Drunkenness Murder ... Treason .. are content to slide along on the sur- face of life, doing a sort of moral crawl stroke, instead of diving down to see what is going on in the depths below. After long and exhaustive re- search, based largely upon the state- ment of this worthy gentleman of the cloth, the following table of cause and effect has been drawn up. It presents an impartial, if thin, so- lution of our present-day issues: Cause Cosmetics. . Flowers on women’s hats. - Female smoking in public . ._Bromidic remarks of Sweet Young Things. . Rolled Stockings. . The way Sob Sisters write. Sor oc teveeeessess+Plucked Eyebrows. Aquatic Tennis Wimbledon, July 4, 1922. SINGLE court surrounded by grandstands, part of which are covered—my seat was not. Rain and the tarpaulins over the turf. Two o'clock. Every seat taken and hundreds of standees. Three o'clock. The tarpaulin is a lake. Four o'clock. Still raining. The crowd in the exposed seats taking it with British pluck. American pluck getting damp and sodden, but hang- ing on. Five o'clock. Lady on my right wishes she had brought her mackin- tosh—surely a reasonable wish. Young lady with her asks, “Do you know when the games are till?” To solve this, moisten the lips, make a wish, think of a number and divide the result by six. On second thought, there is no answer. People go out for their tea. The lady on my right again expresses a wish for her mackintosh. comicbooks.com