Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, March 1924 · page 13 of 71
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #57 — page 13: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page collects brief, humorous "fence post" observations—casual farmyard philosophizing on contemporary topics. The satire targets: 1. **Literary pretension**: A Chicago Tribune story's overwrought description of a woman bathing is mocked as absurdly purple prose. "Gus says the water was a little fresh"—implying the real problem is mundane, not the pseudo-intellectual language. 2. **Marriage and gender**: A cynical exchange questions whether women should confess secrets; the response dismisses it as tired, hackneyed morality drama. Another anecdote depicts marital numbness—a wife's presence causes her husband's leg to fall asleep faster than before, suggesting dulled sensation from routine familiarity. 3. **Extreme drought humor**: An Arizona correspondent exaggerates dryness so extreme that bullfrogs can't swim and cats can't spit—absurdist humor about environmental hardship. The overall tone is wry, deflating pretense (literary and social), and observing life's mundane realities beneath inflated rhetoric.
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Farmyard Fun and Filosophy 11 Fence Post Observations MAYBE they better turn off the spigots and use the tub for a coal bin. Anyway, here's a paragraph from a story called “The Mystery of the Vanished Hours,” which appeared in the Chicago Tribune. “She stepped into the bath, surrendered her-self to the water's voluptuous familiarity. But the sensuousness of the embrace repelled her with its implication of luxurious security; seemed an alien and perfidious presence, in whose contact there was something lewd.” Gus says that perhaps the water was a little fresh. *** “Should a Woman Tell?” asks a sob sister. “Why not?” answers the cynic. “It's the same old story.” *** ONE of Maggie's married woman friends was bemoaning that well-known institu-tion, wedlock. “Marriage makes a big difference to a man,” sighed this confiding wife. “When I sit on John's knee nowadays, his foot goes to sleep much quicker than it used to.” *** A correspondent writes us that it is so dry in parts of Arizona that bullfrogs haven't learned how to swim and the cats can't spit.