Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, July 1921 · page 51 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #22 — page 51: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains no cartoon or illustration—it's a humorous written feature from an early 20th-century American satirical magazine. The magazine published a "model love letter" in April that apparently generated reader demand for another. The joke is the deliberately overwrought, absurdly flowery love letter addressed to "Miss Gumptious." It mocks overwrought romantic sentiment through exaggerated metaphors: a heart like a "churn dasher," joy like "young goats on a stable roof," and Spanish needles through trousers. The comparisons become increasingly ridiculous and crude as the letter progresses—comparing emotions to a gosling in mud, a bumblebee trapped under glass, and eyes "like cellar doors." The satire targets both purple-prose romance writing and young men attempting pretentious courtship, poking fun at earnest but inept romantic expression.
📄 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 49 The Raptures of Cupid In the April issue we published a model love letter, and since then we have been deluged with dimes from anxious swains asking us to hurry along another letter, as their sweethearts had answered the first and were expecting another. As we are always ready to sympathize with crooning youths, and wish to be obliging, we are offering another captivating love note in the following: MY dear Miss Gumptious: Every time I think of you, my heart flops up and down like a churn dasher. Sensations of unutterable joy caper over it like young goats on a stable roof, and thrill through it like Spanish needles through a pair of two linen trousers. As a gosling swimmeth with delight in a mud puddle, so swim I in a sea of glory. Visions of ecstatic rapture, thicker than the hairs of a blacking brush, and brighter than the hues of a humming bird's pinions, visit me in my slumbers; and, borne on their invisible wings, your image stands before me, and I reach out to grasp it, like a pointer snapping at a blue- bottle fly. When I first beheld your angelic perfections I was bewildered, and my brain whirled 'round like a bumble bee under a glass tumbler. My eyes stood open like cellar doors in a country town, and I lifted up my ears to catch the silvery accents of your voice. My