Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, January 1922 · page 8 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #29 — page 8: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page from the satirical magazine contains four separate humorous anecdotes with no accompanying cartoons or illustrations. The jokes target various social groups through ethnic and class stereotypes common to 1920s American humor: 1. **Irish wedding guests** are mocked as rude and greedy for grabbing food. 2. **Idaho natives** are criticized for making homemade alcohol using a chewing/fermentation method—a dig at both indigenous peoples and Prohibition-era bootlegging. 3. **A destitute man** makes a pun about "close shave" when his coin nearly falls into a sewer, choosing drinking over grooming—mocking poverty and alcoholism. 4. **"Helen of Troy"** reference plays on a man named Gus who claims to have dated laundry workers, conflating classical beauty with working-class women—a crude class joke. The overall tone is irreverent, relying on period stereotypes about ethnicity, poverty, and gender for humor that modern readers would find offensive.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
6 Captain Billy's Whiz Bang THE other day I went to an Irish wedding and the people who attended were very ill mannered. Why, I never saw such impolite people. We were all seated around the dinner table and when they brought the turkey in to serve, everybody made a grab for it, but the two legs I got tasted very good. * * * OUT in Idaho it is reported that the natives are making booze in this manner—women chew corn and then “gob” it into a hollowed-out section of a tree trunk. Water is added and the mess allowed to ferment, after which it is imbibed to intoxication. Some drink, we would pause to remark! * * * A FRIEND of mine told me the other night he slept in a wagon standing in an alley, and when he woke up in the morning he had nothing but a dime in his pocket. He was thirsty and he also needed a shave, so he decided to toss the coin to see whether he would get a shave or a drink. He tossed up the dime, and when it came down he missed it and it rolled near a sewer grating, coming to a standstill just half over the edge of the grating. “Gee,” he exclaimed, “that was a close shave. I guess I’ll get a drink.” * * * We asked Gus what he thought of Helen of Troy, but he said that he had stopped running around with those laundry girls.