Volume 2 — History Up-to-Date

Now that the British are agitating for a change in the American history text books, which, they charge, inculcates our future generations with prejudice against the original mother country, and the anti-British are crying for more, let’s fit-in with something in keeping with the spirit of the age. Let’s introduce a history lesson that is guaranteed to interest the shimmy-shaking school children of this great and glorious jazz age. Therefore, we offer for your approval, Professor Brenton’s “History Up-to-date.”

By W. H. BRENTON

Things started off wrong in the beginning when Adam had to give up one of his ribs for Eve, but in spite of this, he, like a game sport, tipped his fig leaf to her upon their first introduction. All ran smoothly until Eve raised Cain, and thus our ancestors (after the monkeys) kept up a constant increase until Noah got inside dope about the flood, whereupon he built the Ark.

Our troubles might have been relegated to the word finis, but Noah stuck up a good old boat and saved his wife, his animals, and their wives. Then Nero played havoc with Rome and made the fiddle famous as the city burned. We’ve been fiddling ever since.

Job next started showing his rights with the off shoots of the chosen people and they said they would stone him to death if he didn’t stop. He came right back by saying, “If you do I’ll turn my bears loose and they will eat you.” The people did, Job did and the bears did. Then Job was King.

I’d like to take some of your time and present the argument between Anthony and Cleopatra, but there was so little between them that it is hardly worth while.

In the days when Cleopatra and Anthony were such good friends, Anthony had just won a big battle and he sent his runners to Cleopatra to tell her to doll up in her glad rags and they would go out stepping. On the way to her flat he met his runners returning. They announced, “Oh, Kind Sir: Cleopatra is down with Tonsilitis.”

“Darn those Greeks,” said Anthony, “I shall declare war on Athens tomorrow.”

Henry Ford started one thing that he played wrong (his cars play good tunes though), when he decided to end the World’s War by taking a lot of men and old maids to France and Germany. If he’d taken some of Ziegfield’s chorus girls the war would have been over and President Wilson would still have been a great man. Just march those girls up No Man’s land, and there would have been so many soldiers following them that a Burroughs adding machine couldn’t count them in the time it takes light to travel from the Sun to Jupiter. Army recruiting stations would have been as popular as senators’ cellars, and the sentiment between the two would have been much stronger than the antagonism between the Bolshevists and the anti-saloon league. But here we are presenting this valuable dope several years too late. Tell your children about it, and they can stop the next war though (if the pretty girls aren’t all dead).

Then a bunch of senators, with big cellars and stills in their attics, passed a law that the combination of wine, women and song must be reduced to women and song. Suppose we substitute nut-sundays, women and song. Substitute your eye, we’ll just play the two undeceased members of the combination a little stronger, unless we get into some senator’s cellar.

Don’t cry, little children, the war is over, and so is a lot of your money, but Uncle Sam will make a lot more, and the Brigadier Generals and the movie actors will get it.

At present we can assume that this is the Movie Age and Out-rage. We walk right past a speech made by the President or some other vote-made man, and several miles to see “Doug” Fairbanks skin his shins by walking up the side of a seven-story building on his hands or to see Charlie Chaplin swing a broom at the villain and hit the Queen of Russia, who is dressed in sackcloth and ashes because of the murder of her last thirty-three husbands.

Movie actors are all right, though. Why, they make more money than we ever hear about. Figures compiled by the Secretary of the Treasury show that a man and wife and family of seventeen children and pets, could live on what Mary Pickford spends for silk stockings, but that is the reason we go to the movies, says the henpecked man as his wife drags him home to their little boiler factory where rolling pins are used as sledgehammers.

If prices keep increasing and clothes decreasing, we will be restricted as to the number of leaves we can wear, and they will be fastened to our shivering yet magnanimous anatomy with paper fasteners of the Henry Ford type. Shimmying will then be automatically abandoned, while courting will only take place over the telephone. When we think of Theda Bara it will be as a heavily clad woman.

Just one thing further, and that is, if this world keeps increasing its speed as it has in the past, our heads will be going so fast that they will look like fish bowls. Everything will just work backwards, our nose will run and our feet smell. Just now we’re traveling so fast that our hip pockets dip sand as we go around corners, and our feet come up so often that people will think we are laying down. Put on your brakes, dear old United Statesers, and let’s slow down to 100 per, or we’ll skid into Mexico.

* * *

You Win Rubber Pajamas

Lecturer (in a loud voice)—I venture to assert there isn’t a man in this audience who has ever done anything to prevent the destruction of our vast forests.

Man in the audience (timidly)—I’ve shot woodpeckers.

* * *

January First

The other day Adam approached Peter at the pearly gates and said:

“I should very much like, Peter, to get a pass the first of the year to revisit my old haunts on earth.”

“Nothing doing, Adam. You started too much trouble down there when you were a young man.”

“Aw, Pete, be a good sport and let me go.”

“What do you want to go down there for anyhow?”

“I want to turn over a new leaf.”

* * *

Gus, our hired man, one of those lucky birds that had imbibed rather too freely of the sacred liquid, had fallen into a watering trough. When I tried to help him as he floundered about, he said: “Offzer, I ken save m’self, you save the womin’n shildern.”

* * *

If You Look That Way

It’s oft been said that woman is a mystery to us that we will never quite see through, no matter how we fuss. It’s said that woman is a book forever closed to man, though now and then she condescends slightly to lift the ban. It’s oft been said we cannot hope to fathom womankind and to that fact the other sex might well make up its mind. But we have called the libel out and dragged it in the dirt. We see right through her now with ease—thanks to the modern skirt.