Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, December 1921 · page 19 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #28 — page 19: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is satirical mockery of overwrought, pretentious romantic writing. The piece parodies verbose love letters stuffed with ostentatious vocabulary—"limpid fulgency," "erotic pumping organ," "mellifluous thought," "fraught fulgency"—strung together with little coherence or genuine feeling. The humor relies on the absurd juxtaposition of grandiose language with mundane emotional whiplash: the writer swings between ecstatic fantasy and crushing despair, ending with intrusive, deflating imagery (floating on a pink cloud eating ice cream with violets). The closing line—"It's a strong stomach that has no turning"—delivers the punchline: reading such overwrought nonsense would make anyone nauseous. This mocks both affected romantic posturing and the pseudo-intellectual verbosity common in early 20th-century sentimentality, suggesting that excessive ornamentation masks emotional emptiness.
📄 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 17 An Opulent Love Letter! Oh, dearie! just the lucid thought of your love, yes just to think of it fills my combined heart and soul with the most limpid fulgency. Every time I think of you my erotic pumping organ vibrates all through my body. It is just your love that keeps my soul from sacrifice. One minute I imagine you are exulting your thought on me in the most wonderful way, and then I feel, Oh, so strong and lusty, and it encounters the greatest exultation of my life, but before I know it the door flies open and the entire thought escapes without impetus, and then the next thing to come is a thought rather much undesirable. I just imagine you think very little of me and that you are keeping it concealed just to see how jejune you can drain my poor heart from that pure living love of yours, and, Oh! it makes me feel so impotent that I want to loll my life away. It is just the lack of your levity that hurts, and my heart turns gelid and cold but after I carry that muse for a minute then the most mellifluous thought comes to my mind telling me that you are thinking of me in the most elegant way and my eyes fly wide open with fraught fulgency and I feel as though I am floating on a lovely pink cloud eating ice cream smothered in violets, and Oh! * * * It's a strong stomach that has no turning.