Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, August 1921 · page 63 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #23 — page 63: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humor page from *Captain Billy's Whiz Bang*, a satirical magazine popular in the 1920s-30s. The content consists of three unrelated jokes: 1. **The opening poem** is a deliberately incomplete sea shanty about a sailor on a ship bound for Sydney. The narrator tells the mate to "go away"—likely a euphemistic or suggestive punchline that trails off. 2. **The editorial note** acknowledges the poem is amateurish ("we grew tired and finished it up"), self-deprecatingly admitting the writers couldn't sustain the verse. 3. **The "Gus" anecdote** is a romantic/flirtation joke: a man meets a girl at a movie; she has her arm around him, but afterward he discovers her arm was also in his pocket—suggesting either theft or intimate contact he didn't fully notice. 4. **The closing quip** sardonically suggests romantic loss is preferable to hearing divorce court testimony. The humor is mild, bawdy-adjacent, and relies on innuendo rather than explicit content—typical of the era's popular humor magazines.
📄 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 61 Arthur Neale's Page I joined a Frisco schooner—a good ship, I was told; Bound for Sydney, New South Wales, with lumber in the hold. We'd left the South behind, boys; began to feel the swell, When the mate looked in the fo'c'sle. I said: “Mister, go away.” * * * FASCINATED by the spell of the Smoke- house Poetry, and having sailed the seven seas and visited most every place East and West of Suez, including Hoboken, N. J., we wished to show the doubting Gus that we also could string together that line of verse. Hence the above. When we got to the fourth line, however, we grew tired and finished it up. * * * Gus writes us that he went to St. Paul the other day. He met a girl and they went into a movie. He says she sat there with her arm around his waist, and after she'd said good-bye he found it had been in his pocket as well. * * * 'Tis better to have loved and lost when you read of some of the mean things they say in the divorce court.