Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, September 1921 · page 51 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #27 — page 51: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains satirical theater criticism, not a cartoon. The author critiques Broadway's catastrophic season, where nineteen shows closed within a month of opening—with most "richly deserved" the failure. The satire targets the "high brow" literary movement toward "realistic" theater, which he mocks for replacing dramatic action with endless dialogue. He argues that modern playwrights justify tedious conversation by claiming people talk about nothing for hours in real life, therefore stage characters should do the same. His sarcasm crescendos with a prediction that these authors will eventually show realistic mundanities like "putting hair lotion on their bald spots and trimming" nails—implying such extreme realism becomes absurd and boring. The economic context matters: even "Six Cylinder Love," supposedly the season's hit, was already discount-priced, indicating severe box office troubles. This satirizes both pretentious avant-garde theater and Broadway's commercial collapse.
📄 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 whole thing was suddenly hushed up. I leave it to you to imagine what happened. It looks like a rotten year for the theatre business—and perhaps for other business. At this writing there is not one legitimate show in New York doing any business. “Six Cylinder Love,” a comedy about a family which buys an automobile before they can really afford to do so, is supposed to be the one big hit of New York and it has already been forced to take blocks of its tickets over to the reduced rate ticket office to be sold at a discount. Already, with the season hardly started, the beach is strewn with wrecks. One month, after the opening of the season, some nineteen shows had gone broke and had been taken off. To be honest about it, I think most of the nineteen richly deserved it. For some unaccountable reason, nearly all the shows are infernally talky this year. The curtain goes up on a pair of people who gabble at you over the footlights until you have the blind staggers. When they—and you—are groggy, another pair take up the talk fest. Nothing ever happens but chatter. This is supposed to be the new “literal” and “realistic” school. The high brow authors contend that their characters gabble over nothing for hours in real life; therefore, they should gabble by the hour about nothing in mimic life. By the same token I dare say they will show them putting hair lotion on their bald spots and trimming