Life — November 13, 1924 — page 7: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "Ballad in the College Yell Manner" This is a satirical poem presented as a mock college fight song, combining traditional collegiate cheer formats with absurdist humor. The page pairs repetitive "Rah! Rah! Rah!" chants with surreal, increasingly nonsensical lyrics—shifting from recognizable college references (buttermilk, talcum powder, soup) to the bizarre (purple gold taupe, spud tin, crocodiles and gee-strings). The satire targets the emptiness of collegiate enthusiasm and school spirit, suggesting that college yells are performative noise masking meaninglessness. Small cartoon panels between stanzas provide visual absurdism reinforcing this critique. The joke is that if you replace standard cheer content with random words while maintaining the loud, enthusiastic format, the essential structure remains—implying college spirit itself is hollow performance rather than genuine sentiment.