Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #59 — page 13: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This page contains three separate humorous anecdotes rather than cartoons: 1. **The Bathtub Story**: A joke about "Gus," a hired man who fell asleep in a running bathtub. The humor relies on the clerk's dry observation that Gus was "lucky he slept with his mouth open"—implying the water would have drained into his mouth rather than overflowing the tub. 2. **Social Commentary**: A brief quip about changing times, replacing "wine, women and song" with "methyl alcohol, a trained nurse and 'Lead Kindly Light.'" 3. **Hamlin Garland Quote**: Discusses the literary tendency to romanticize rural life while criticizing cities. Author Garland explains his preference for cities despite their physical ugliness—he values "intellectual companionship" over pastoral aesthetics. The page reflects 1920s attitudes toward modernization, rural versus urban life, and satirizes both literary pretension and everyday absurdity.