Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, August 1922 · page 42 of 67
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #36 — page 42: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains two satirical poems from *Captain Billy's Whiz Bang*, a post-WWI American humor magazine. **"Ode to the Fag"** (using "fag" as British/Canadian slang for cigarette) celebrates tobacco's morale value for soldiers in WWI trenches. The poem humorously depicts horrific combat conditions—freezing weather, artillery bombardment, near-death experiences—and argues cigarettes provided crucial psychological comfort. It was written by a Canadian Mounted Police officer to encourage tobacco donations to soldiers. **"Virtue a la Carte"** satirizes film censorship boards, particularly the emerging Motion Picture Standards Board. The poem mocks censors' self-appointed moral authority: they claim expertise in detecting vice and immorality, yet inconsistently judge artworks (Rembrandt etchings, classical nudes) by arbitrary "Standards of the Board" rather than consistent principles. The satire suggests censors are hypocrites—trained to obsess over "flirty" content while pretending to uphold objective morality. Both poems reflect 1920s anxieties about state/institutional control over behavior and expression.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
40 Captain Billy's Whiz Bang Ode to the Fag Whiz Bang is in receipt of an "Ode to the Cigarette" sent in by Charles Wagner, a member of the Northwest Mounted Police at Edmonton. It was written during the war and helped stimulate donations to the Canadian tobacco fund. Excerpts are as follows: When the cold is making ice cream of the marrow in your bones, When you're shaking like a jelly and your feet are dead as stones, When your clothes and boots and blankets and your rifle and your kit Are soaked from hell to breakfast, and the dugout where you sit Is leaking like a basket, and upon a muddy floor The water lies in filthy pools, six inches deep or more; Though life seems cold and dreary and all the world it wet, You always get through somewhere, if you've got a cigarette. When Fritz is starting something and his guns are on the bust, When the parapet goes up in chunks, and settles down in dust, When the roly-poly "rum jar" comes a-woofing through the air Till it lands upon a dugout, and the dugout isn't there; When the air is full of dust and smoke and scraps of steel and noise, And you think you're booked for golden crowns and other heav- enly joys, When your nerves are all a-tremble and your brain is all a-fret— It isn't half as hopeless if you've got a cigarette. * * * Virtue a la Carte It doesn't always follow that if Venus or Apollo Or the nudes of Zuloaga are translated to the screen That the censors so omniscient will consider that sufficient Ground for passing on the picture as quite fitting to be seen. Just because a Rembrandt etching is considered more than fetching, Still the version in the movie might not meet with the accord Of the movie picture censors, those infallible dispensers Of morality—according to the Standards of the Board. So this censorship committee shall prescribe to every city Just the proper set of morals that the pictures shall afford. They are trained in all that's flirty—they know vice—they know what's dirty, And they know by heart the rules they