Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, July 1921 · page 27 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #22 — page 27: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a satirical piece from *Captain Billy's Whiz Bang*, a humor magazine popular in the 1920s-30s. The text mocks beach-goers with exaggerated, unflattering descriptions: "pop-eyed, pot-bellied promenaders," "vulgar Venuses," and "heavy-hipped hags." The satire targets the gap between idealized images of beach leisure and reality. The author contrasts how beachgoers look "nice and dry" versus when wet, and compares them unfavorably to glamorous "Sunday supplement" illustrations while comparing them favorably to crude "comic supplement" caricatures—the joke being that actual beachgoers resemble exaggerated cartoon drawings more than idealized media images. The classical reference to Ulysses and sirens adds mock-heroic humor: these "sweating sirens" aren't seductive—they're repulsive. The overall point: beach culture exposes the unglamorous reality beneath modern leisure aspirations.
📄 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 25 We came away from the beach that Sunday with a composite picture of pop-eyed, pot-bellied promenaders in the sand, vulgar Venuses, wobbly wenches, living links, heavy-hipped hags, sinuous, shrunken men, tat-tered tights, tousled head nymphs, and vain cock of the walks admiring their own shape and gazing on their feet and fingernails. We wish we could forget the bather's singularity and angularity, the plethoric paunch, the blinking, bawling, calling, sprawling, mawling, drawling, squall-ing figures that defaced the beauty of the sky, the sea and the sand. Oh, the water cataracts running and dripping from shaking sides, heavy hips and swinging busts! If Ulysses and his crew sailed by this shore with its sweating sirens and howling hurdy-gurdies, they would stop their ears—but not for fear of being enticed ashore. The poet sings of the "smile" of the sea—we do not wonder at laughing waves when they see some of the freak styles. What are the wild waves saying? Some things we think we better omit. To watch this beach of bathers is like having a front seat at the Winter Garden Follies. The visitor may study the contour of beach and bathers. Here he meets the living skeleton of angles and the bag of bones, as well as her heavy-set sister with all her capricious curves, crests, elevations and depressions. How unlike the pictures in the Sunday supplements, and how like the caricatures in the comic supplement. When first they appear all nice and dry they are passable, but look at them if you dare and can, when they take a dip or