Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, August 1922 · page 11 of 67
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #36 — page 11: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous rural essay with no visible cartoon imagery. The piece satirizes farm life and early-morning country sounds through comedic anecdotes. The narrator encounters his Swedish farmhand Olaf mysteriously listening outside at night. When asked what he's doing, Olaf cryptically replies he's "listening to the cook 'Oo'"—a pun on the cuckoo bird's call. The joke plays on the double meaning: actual cuckoo birds versus the sound itself. The essay then catalogs the cacophony of farmyard dawn—roosters, flickers, blackbirds, wrens, jays, sparrows, and mockingly, "Pedro junior" (likely a bird) "calling to his twenty wives." The final anecdote about Irish farmhand Ikey illustrates the mosquito plague: so distracted by listening to nighttime bird calls he's sleep-deprived and disoriented, absurdly scratching his hot cakes and pouring syrup down his back instead of eating. The satire gently mocks rural life's chaotic sounds and the eccentricities of immigrant farmworkers.
📄 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 9 WITH the advent of summer the farm and woodland warblers are in full song. Which probably is why I met Olaf coming around the house the other night. “What have you been doing there?” I asked my Swedish Svengali. “Listening,” replied Olaf. “At what?” “Listening to the cook ‘Oo’ was Olaf’s quite unanswerable explanation. If there were any cooks-ooing about at that time of the night they should have been in their cook-oo clocks getting some sleep. It has struck me, anyway, that the cook-oos and the buzzing and feathered folk have an exaggerated idea of when the day begins. Long before dawn the cocks start the morning symphony with their lusty crowing. This seems to awaken envy in all the melody makers. You hear the br-r-r of the flicker; the blackbird follows with his liquid music; the jolly little wren is on hand with his morning twitter; the blue-winged jay softens his call a little to welcome the daybreak, while in the background there echoes the busy chirp of the ever-present sparrow and the soft melody of another wonderful bird, Pedro junior, calling to his twenty wives. That little pest, the mosquito, is up so early he meets himself going to bed. My Irish farm hand, Ikey, has the mosquito itch so badly that I noticed when he was eating Maggie’s hot cakes the other morning he scratched his cakes and poured the syrup down his back. Ikey must have been out listening to the cook-oos,