Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, March 1922 · page 7 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #31 — page 7: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes **temperance movement** rhetoric and working-class morality tales. The Rev. "Golightly" Morrill (a recurring character) is mocked as a self-righteous reformer who travels abroad seeking moral failings to expose—a jab at sanctimonious journalists. The main content presents **barroom songs**—satirical drinking ballads parodying temperance warnings. They mock the predictable moralizing: regretful drunks swearing off alcohol, warnings about lost fortunes and failed marriages. The absurdist final verse (whiskers on a cabbage head) suggests the absurdity of drunk perception itself. **Whiz Bang's** point: temperance crusaders and their melodramatic cautionary tales are laughable and hypocritical. The magazine adopts a cynical, working-class perspective rejecting moral panic about drinking as pretentious moralizing. The satire targets both self-righteous reformers and the formulaic sentimental songs used to warn against vice.
📄 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 5 sees the world from the standpoint of the bet- terment of humanity and in seeking to attain his end, strikes out in two-fisted manner. In republishing a recent Morrill article from this magazine, a Havana publication takes this rap at our correspondent: The Rev. “Golightly” Morrill is still tramping around the world seeking muck in which to wallow. After his experience in the West Indies and Central America it was not to be supposed that he would find anything very bad to write about, but it seems that he has discovered familiar iniquities on the beaches of California. * * * WE chanced into a gringo barroom towards the close of one evening, lured by broken melodies of the brass rail gang. Through the bedlam we could catch swinging tunes of: I’ll never get drunk any more, I’ll never get drunk any more, I’ll never enter a barroom door, I’ll never get drunk any more. I wish I had taken my mother’s advice, and married a nice little wife, And settled down in the old home town, to lead an honest life. My father gave me a fortune, I placed it all in my trunk, But I lost it all a-gambling, one night while I was drunk. I’ll never get drunk any more. And this one: Wifie says you’re crazy, you’re drunk, you’re blind and can’t see, That’s nothing but a cabbage head the grocer gave to me. Now ten thousand miles I’ve traveled, with ten thousand more to go, But whiskers on a cabbage head I never saw before.