Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, September 1921 · page 11 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #27 — page 11: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humor column from an early 20th-century satirical magazine featuring disconnected anecdotes and jokes. The content includes: **A bartender joke** mocking stale eggs and aged sherry—implying poor-quality alcohol. **Deacon Miller anecdote**: A conservative rural neighbor dismisses both the narrator's new airplane and the magazine itself as foolish. The humor lies in Miller's absurd logic: he won't own something that "flies and doesn't lay eggs"—conflating machines with livestock. **The 33,000-pound bull**: A humorous news item about an unusually large pedigreed animal, with a joke about the difficult labor required to manage it. **The "Whiffenpoof" debate**: Readers dispute the definition of this (apparently fictional) creature. A Kansas reader proposes it's a bird eating hot peppers that must fly backward to prevent its tail from catching fire—pure nonsense humor. **Final aphorism**: A mild joke about young men confusing romantic pursuit with fashion-following. The page's tone is lighthearted, provincial, and absurdist—typical of pre-1920s American comic 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 9 “Bartender, if your Sherry was as old as your egg and your egg was as young as your Sherry, this would be a dang good drink.” * * * DEACON MILLER, my long-haired neighbor, doesn’t approve of the aeroplane which I purchased recently any more than he does of my Whiz Bang. When our hired man told the Deacon about my purchase of the plane, old Miller grunted and snorted and said he wouldn’t own any fool thing that would fly and not lay any eggs. * * * WE HAVE it from the Seattle Post Intelligencer that the Justamere farm at Mount Vernon, Washington, is the home of Colony Zarilda Cornucopia, the only 33,000-pound pedigreed bull in the state. I’d hate to be the hired man that had to throw this bull every day. * * * MY, MY, MY, what an agitation we have started over the definition of a “Whiffenpoof.” A Kansas reader avers that everybody is wrong so far; that a “Whiffenpoof” is a bird that eats red pepper and has to fly backwards to keep his tail from catching on fire. * * * Some young men seem to imagine that they are following the fashions when they are on the trail of a pretty girl.