Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, May 1921 · page 65 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #20 — page 65: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains three brief humorous anecdotes typical of 1920s men's magazines. **Main story**: A married man, who had promised to reform his bachelor ways, comes home at 5 AM after a night out with old friends—clearly drunk ("dazed condition"). His wife catches him undressing and demands to know where his vest is. His desperate lie—that he left it in a cab—is transparently absurd, hence the title: "You Can't Fool 'em at Tall" (wives are too clever for such excuses). **The intermediate jokes** include a list sarcastically naming every month as "unlucky" for marriage, and a crude double-entendre about eggs that leads to the narrator being slapped. The humor targets married men's infidelity, domestic deception, and the perpetual tension between husbands' desire for bachelor freedom and wives' vigilance. The satire assumes a male audience sympathetic to the husband's predicament while acknowledging women's justified skepticism of male excuses.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang 63 You Can't Fool 'em at Tall He had been married about six months, during which time he had made the most strenuous endeavors to abandon his former naughty ways and to give up his intemperate bachelor friends and the numerous pretty ladies with whom he had so long been associated. But it happened one day that he fell in with a very dear friend, till in a somewhat dazed condition he eventually fetched up at his “home sweet” ’round about five o’clock on the following morning. Stealthily he crept upstairs to bed and wife being, as he imagined, asleep, equally stealthily did he start to undress in the cold, gray light of dawn. For a time all went well; then suddenly a voice rose above the stillness: “Charles, where’s your vest?” Charles pulled himself together rapidly and endeavored to review the situation. “My dear,” he replied confidentially, after much mental effort, “upon my soul, I believe I must have left it—in the cab!” * * * Unlucky months for getting married: Jan., Feb., Mar., Apr., May, June, July, Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec. * * * My girl brought me a basket of eggs. As she stepped up the steps, I said, “What beautiful eggs.” And when she reached me she slapped my face. * * * Only five months to wait for the second October Whiz Bang annual.