Comic Relief
We’re spending a few days at our seaside retreat in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on the outer extremity of Cape Cod, and today found the memsahib and me poking around at a local flea market. I’m always on the lookout for odd books, and after I had already, with reluctance, been talked by my better half out of spending $14 on a well-kept copy of a lavishly illustrated tome from 1898 entitled Our New Possessions — about the then-recent US acquisition of the Phillipines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii — I slyly dropped a fin for a slim volume called The World’s Best Jokes, by one Lewis Copeland, copyright 1936. I always enjoy antique joke-books, and this looks like a real corker.
I haven’t had time to look it over yet, but here’s the table of contents (don’t get caught with this on a college campus):
I: American Jokes
II: Yankee Jokes
III: Rube Jokes
IV: Negro Jokes
V: Irish Jokes
VI: Scottish Jokes
Glossary of Scottish Words
VII: Jewish Jokes
VIII: Hobo Jokes
IX: Jokes about Drunks
X: Jokes about Preachers
XI: Jokes about Lawyers
XII: Jokes about Doctors
XIII: Broadway Wisecracks
XIV: College Jokes
XV: Witty Retorts
XVI: Epitaphs
XVII: Epigrams in Verse
XVIII: Toasts
XIX: Little Willies
XX: Boners
XXI: Limericks
XXII: Comic Verse
XXIII: Nonsense Poems
XXIV: Parodies
XXV: College Rhymes
XXVI: Negro Dialect
XXVII: Western Dialect Verse
XXVIII: Irish and Other Verses
“Little Willies”, indeed. Pure gold, friends. Stay tuned; hilarity will ensue.
Related content from Sphere
July 2nd, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Interesting that Little Willies immediately precedes Boners.
July 2nd, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Perhaps Little Willie is like Shorty when what follows follows:
“Shorty’s Bar and Grill, Albequerque, New Mexico.”
Not so short after all.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
July 2nd, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Dammit. Shorty can’t spell “Albuquerque”!
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
July 7th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Amazing. I was searching the Web for this book and this is the only hit that came up. I read this book as a child while visiting relatives. I wonder if they still have the book. Great buy!
July 7th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Hi KR,
Glad you dropped by. You might like to take a look at Google’s files on this whimsical little masterpiece; you can find them here.