Life, 1928-12-14 · page 21 of 48
Life — December 14, 1928 — page 21: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This Life magazine page contains three distinct pieces of humor: **Top Cartoon**: A child asks her father for a nickel, promising good behavior and not asking for it—a paradox exposing how children's logic contradicts itself. The joke mocks innocent manipulation by youngsters. **Middle Section**: An anecdote about a woman's visit disrupting the narrator's plans. The humor lies in the petty social drama of gift-giving etiquette (bath salts vs. soap) and the narrator's husband's quip that she should have written a book about a woman who "always did exactly as she pleased"—implying the narrator doesn't. **Bottom Cartoons**: Two brief exchanges—one about SOS signals on stormy seas (unclear context), and one where a photographer humorously misunderstands a customer's request for "life-size enlargements" of a Grand Canyon snapshot, implying he'd create an enormous print. **"Places I Can Never Find"**: A humorous list by Baron Ireland cataloging domestic absurdities—lost items, unmarked locations, spousal disagreements—relatable to 1920s readers experiencing modern inconveniences like automobile exhaust ("carbon monoxide").
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
“Daddy, will you give me a nickel, please, if I'm good and don’t ask for it?” Boothby, to get her to attend to one or two matters of vital import, and she so a-twitter over where we had gone to Get Away From It All that she did demand to lunch with us instanter, so she came, and did tell us how she planned to get even with one of her cousins this Christ- mas by sending her some bath salts, for- asmuch as last year this kinswoman had written her that she had meant to give her an antique, but, being doubtful of her taste, was sending her something which she could surely use, and when Marge opened the package it did reveal six cakes of soap. The rest of the day | spent over periodicals and embroidery, a] lovely life for a time, methinks, and when, beginning Emanie Sachs’s “The Terrible Siren,” 1 did say to Sam, “Just think! Here is a book about a woman who al- ways did exactly as she pleased!" he did then ask me if I had wrote it, so when Tuere never was a seasick passenger on a stormy sea who did not think that an SOS should be sent out. from snapshots? Places I Can Never Find Tue prace where I left off in my de- tective story. The marvelous spot I couldn't miss if I followed the Mortons’ directions where they had their wonderful picnic. The little inn that serves such a perfect lunch for sixty-five cents just outside Spencer, Mass. The old swimming-hole. The place where they serve absolutely nothing but genuine simon-pure pre-war. The place where I left my rubbers. The place where my wife put them. The place where she says I put them. | A place that doesn’t smell of carbon monoxide. Baron Ireland. first guffaw in an unseemly fashion and! Girt: Do you make life-size enlargements | 19 prudence has been achieved by an In- Wuar seems to be a new mark | diana lady who, wishing to mail a small the dinner card came, I did choose nought | Protocrariier: That's our specialty, miss.| remittance to Sears-Roebuck, asked an in- but what took forty minutes and cost | Girt: Fine. Here's a picture I took of the formation editor for the exact street ad- three dollars. Grand Canyon. dress in Chicago. comicbooks.com