Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #3 — page 13: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a satirical narrative mocking post-WWI social changes and jazz culture. The unnamed narrator describes attending a "jazz festival" with "Kid Herpercide," where he encounters a doorman distributing blue ribbons that grant men the right to hug women without consequence—a jab at perceived moral loosening of the 1920s. The satire targets: - Jazz as frivolous "novelty noise" - Post-war social permissiveness and sexual license - The "Roaring Twenties" culture clash The narrator, disguised by three weeks' stubble, nearly fools the doorman into thinking he's a "bulshevik or anti-saloon leaguer"—mocking both radical politics and Prohibition-era temperance advocates as equally suspicious outsiders. The humor relies on exaggeration of contemporary anxieties about modernization.