Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, February 1922 · page 16 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #30 — page 16: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page from the satirical magazine contains several brief humorous sketches typical of early 20th-century American comic writing: **"The Wa-hoo-wa Bird"** presents a tall tale about an exotic, fictional bird from Borneo that mates only once per century, then celebrates atop a rubber tree. The joke appears to mock both tall-tale storytelling and romantic sentimentality—the bird's ecstatic cry "My Gawsch, Mamma, ain't love grand!" uses exaggerated dialect humor common to the era. **"Deciding the Race"** relies on a simple con-artist setup: Pat proposes a race where he'll mark the tree if he wins, but Mike must erase the mark if he wins first—creating an impossible situation for Mike. **"The Old Boy's Chatter"** contains crude physical humor about marrying a bow-legged woman (making her physical defect visible) and a mild joke about men prioritizing appearance on weekends. These sketches exemplify Whiz Bang's bawdy, vaudeville-influenced humor style popular with working-class audiences.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
14 Captain Billy's Whiz Bang had the saddle on himself and he spent another half hour in vain trying to climb on his own back. * * * The Wa-hoo-wa Bird Ladies and Gentlemen, I take great pleasure in presenting to you the Wa-hoo-wa Bird. The only bird of its kind in captivity today. This strange bird comes from the far off shores of the Isle of Borneo where it rears its young among the crannies and crags of the mountainous coastline. Now the particular strange thing about this bird is that it only mates once every one hundred years, and after having mated, it crawls, half drags, half flies, until it gets itself to the topmost pinnacle of the long, tall, lofty rubber tree. Casting its eyes to the heavens it cries in tones of ecstacy “Wa-hoo-wa,” which, translated in the language of the natives, means “My Gawsch, Mamma, ain’t love grand!” * * * Deciding the Race Pat and Mike were to run a race to a tree by different routes. Pat—“If oi get there first oi’ll make a mark on the tree with this chalk, Mike, and if you get there first you rub it off.” * * * The Old Boy’s Chatter The fellow who marries a bow-legged girl these days has no excuse that he can’t see what he’s getting. * * * He doesn’t dress so neat on work days, but he wears his new hat on his week end.