Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, July 1922 · page 48 of 67
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #35 — page 48: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a gossip and entertainment column satirizing Broadway and Hollywood in the 1920s. The text mocks: **De Wolf Hopper and Hedda Hopper**: A famous comedian known for multiple marriages; the column jokes that his impending divorce from actress Hedda Hopper may set a record for his marital adventures. **"Lady Godiva" film adaptation**: The column ridicules the movie's excessive censoring—making Tennyson's famous nude-horse-ride legend completely inoffensive. It sarcastically notes promoters added "Lord" to the poet's name thinking "nobility stuff counts big" for marketing. **Lady Diana Manners in "The Glorious Adventure"**: The writer dismisses her as stiffly aristocratic and overly concerned with appearing "bred" rather than delivering genuine performance. The satire targets both Hollywood's timidity with censorship and the era's snobbish valorization of British nobility in American entertainment. The humor relies on readers recognizing these entertainment figures and industry practices of the period.
📄 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 47 given considerable space by one of the New York newspapers for its stock selling methods. * * * THE stage world, too, is at low ebb. We hear that Hedda Hopper, fifth or sixth wife of the much married De Wolf Hop- per, is about to start divorce proceedings. De Wolf must be somewhere near the front of our marrying stars and the present Mrs. Hopper's proceedings, if they materialize, may give the comedian with the weird toupe a chance to try for a new record. We'll see. Nothing sensational has appeared on either the film or stage horizon. Broadway has had Tennyson's "Lady Godiva" done in celluloid but done in a way to get by even a censor. It was amusing to observe the way they electric signed the poet as "Lord Tennyson," the promoters having decided, it is said "that the nobility stuff counts big." The Godiva person's ride was conservative, we must admit. The man who sat ahead of us at the showing loudly lamented the fact that bobbed hair wasn't in fashion in those days. * * * ANOTHER new film, "The Glorious Adven- ture," sported Lady Diana Manners. Maybe the lure of a real lady in the films means something but this Lady Diana is certainly reserved. She registers breeding for every inch of the film and never once forgets