Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, March 1922 · page 14 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #31 — page 14: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains two short joke stories rather than political cartoons: **"This Sounds Like Bull"** mocks both the absurdity of the patient's claim (swallowing a mouse while sleeping) and the doctor's impractical solution. The humor lies in the escalating ridiculousness: a hotel doctor calls in a cat to catch a mouse using cheese bait, then abandons the patient to drink. The punchline—the cat disappears—suggests the cat may have eaten the patient's imaginary mouse, leaving no evidence. **"Pat's Hole"** is an Irish-immigrant joke (indicated by "Pat" and "sor"). The boss questions whether all the excavated dirt will fit back into the hole Pat is digging. Pat's response—that he hasn't dug the hole deep enough—is intentionally obtuse, treating a straightforward geometric problem as requiring unrealistic solutions. Both stories exemplify early-20th-century American magazine humor: absurdist scenarios played straight, with punchlines depending on characters' illogical reasoning.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
12 Captain Billy's Whiz Bang This Sounds Like Bull A visitor who was stopping at a hotel was much disturbed by the snoring of one of his friends sleeping in an adjoining room. Sud- denly the snore ceased and death-like stillness oppressed the listener. Thinking that some- thing had happened to his friend, he went into his room, and found him sitting up in bed. The friend said, “I was sleeping with my mouth open, and I think I have swallowed a mouse.” The hotel doctor was sent for, who adopted the novel expedient of calling in the services of the hotel cat, and placed a piece of toasted cheese some little distance from the patient’s mouth, thinking that the mouse, smelling the cheese, would come out to eat it and would fall a prey to the cat. While the remedy was work- ing, the doctor went downstairs to get a drink, and the patient fell asleep and resumed his snoring. When the doctor returned the cat was miss- ing. * * * Pat’s Hole Pat was hard at work digging a post-hole, when the boss strolled by. “Well, Pat,” said he, noting the progress of the work, “do you think you will be able to get all that dirt back into the hole again?” Pat looked doubtfully at the pile of dirt, and after some thought, said: “No, sor. Sure, I don’t think I’ve dug the hole deep enough.”