The Annotated Conundrums

Q: When was pork first introduced into the navy?

A: When Ham entered the Ark. (P. 61)

* As previously mentioned , North America was once home to a race of talking pigs hunted to extinction when it was discovered that pork came from pigs and not old shoes.  Yet in a nation where Darwin’s evolutionary theory had yet to be fully understood (as opposed to Europe, which was already developing a race of super-humans through progressive inbreeding of pale, sickly hemophiliacs), the origin of these loquacious swine was eagerly sought.  One of the most popular theories postulated that pigs traced their lineage back to Noah’s son Ham.

Fig. 203 – A modern production of a “Pigssion Play” retelling the saga of Ham (foreground) and his wife Na’eltama’uk (holding son Mizraim)

The story of Ham would have been well-known to readers.   How, in retaliation for making sport of his inebriated father’s naked body, a curse was placed on his descendants.  At first it was assumed that this curse involved the transformation of Ham and his lineage into talking pigs, but this was deemed too “adorable” to serve as an adequate punishment.

Rather, theologians came to understand that Ham had always been a pig, albeit an unusually intelligent pig who felt no chemistry with the rather dense sow Noah had married him off to.  Talented, as all pigs are, in the arts of seduction, Ham courted and married one of Noah’s many female (human) groupies, who bore him a son — the first talking pig.  Modern scholars now realize that this story is a myth, and that talking pigs were in fact placed on earth by Satan to deceive us.

Q: Which is the grand seat of learning?

A: The seat of a boy’s pants, for it is that to which the schoolmaster applies himself. (p. 91)

* The first hundred years of the American Republic were, in many ways, the greatest Greek revival since the Renaissance.  One need only look to the Doric columns that gird the nation’s capital to see the young state’s reverence for classical learning, and the classical methods of teaching.

Q: Why is a policeman like a rainbow?

A: Because he rarely appears until the storm is over. (p. 17)

* One of the more unsavory characteristics of Conundrums New and Old is its reliance on cruel, hateful Irish stereotypes.  While a later IAB investigation did uncover at least seven practicing Leprechauns in the Chicago Police Department at the turn of the century, that represented only a slim minority of the Irish cops working the beat at that time.

Fig. 22 – Some believed that capturing one required him to give you his pot of gold.

Q: Why should the goat’s milk be used most in the dairy?

A: Because the goat makes the best butter. (P. 129)

* Don’t be confused if you find yourself failing to laugh at this joke.   The fact is it was never meant to be funny, but rather represents Frederick J. Drake’s salvo in one of the early 20th century’s greatest controversies, the “Better Butter Debate”.  Until this point, it was generally agreed that the pungent greenish-orange lactation of the whale made the richest and tastiest butter.  In fact, demand for cetacean butter single-handedly turned the whaling community of New Bedford, Massachusetts into the global metropolis it remains today.  Unfortunately, decades of over-milking depleted this precious resource, leaving America without a ready supply of butter.

Fig. 43 – The nipples that once buttered biscuits from Bangor to San Francisco

To confront the emerging butter crisis, President McKinley convened a blue-ribbon commission to find the animal best fit to produce “the butter of the 20th century”.  However the ultimate report, which recommended the secretions of the Northern River Otter, was revealed to be the product of backdoor bribery by a shady cabal of Otter Barons and their lobbyists.   Soon, everyone in the nation seemed to have an opinion on where America should get its butter, with ducks and octopi having particularly vociferous advocates.  Ultimately, the decision was made to rely on relatively inferior cow milk since, as President McKinely announced at the Pan-American Exposition minutes before his assassination at the hand of an anarchist and unemployed otter rancher, “we’ve got so many of the damn things.”

Drake’s argument for goats was too little too late, and the proposed “Drake & Co. Goatworks” arms of his publishing empire never went further than the initial planning stage.

Q: If a child should break his knee where would he go?

A: To a butcher’s where kid-nees (kidneys) are sold. (P. 140)

* Let’s not kid ourselves.  The United States of 1902 was a far more brutal and shocking place than the nation we live in today, what with its gender inequality, legal murder, and rampant spitting.  But perhaps the most surprising  activity of the time was the casual acceptance of cannibalism within certain proscribed limits.  Adults could not eat adults, nor could they eat children.  But children, who were considered savage beasts as yet untamed by the civilizing power of having a branch or belt harshly applied to their buttocks (the same stern discipline that had transformed the nomadic native americans into proud, settled citizens), were freely allowed to devour each other and any adult too slow to escape their hungry grasp.

Fig. 108 – Packs of ravenous children turned America’s major cities into nocturnal deathtraps for careless adults

Knee joints were particularly in demand for their reputed healing properties, as well as spleens which children believed would give them the ability to see the future and therefore not have to wait to see what crazy jam the Katzenjammer Kids were going to get into tomorrow.   Of course by 1905 child cannibalism had been outlawed as part of President Roosevelt’s great “My God, We Still Allow These Things?” regulatory push.  Businesses catering to juveniles were forced to adapt or perish, with the most successful being Wendy’s, which changed its name from “Wendies” and re-explained its mascot as the owner’s daughter, rather than an enticing example of the quality child-meat available for purchase.

Q: Why is polka like bitter beer?

A: There are so many hops in it. (p. 24)

* With wave after wave of German immigration, the 19th Century saw two nationwide crazes take off: beer and polka.  Both were later outlawed, when the US became involved in World War I, but they were still widely beloved in 1902.  And it wasn’t just joke writers who were eager to cash in on their popularity; President Roosevelt himself stopped the United Mine Workers strike while wearing liederhosen, and afterward had his national Ooompah Laureate perform a polka written especially for the occasion.

Fig. 92 – An 1850 adaptation of La Belle et la Bête

Polka underwent a brief resurgence after the end of Prohibition (the 18th Amendment banned “alcoholic beverages and the Hun dances that accompany their consumption”), until Americans — who had since been exposed to jazz — almost immediately realized it was awful.

Q: How do we know that men were evolved form the vegetable kingdom?

A: Because many of them are small potatoes still. (p. 67)

* This is one of many jokes in Conundrums New and Old that could best be described as “extremely stupid.”  But the scientific underpinning is also deeply flawed.  Late 19th Century understanding of Darwin’s theory of evolution was sketchy at best — while it’s true that plants and mammals can trace their origins back to the same evolutionary trunk, conventional wisdom around this time held that the split had been relatively recent.

Fig. 87 – 19th-century costume artist’s reconstruction of Alexander the Great

Contemporary thinkers believed that humans had evolved from plants around 400 B.C., during the rise of the Macedonian empire.  This was before Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium” theory, so scientists believed that there was a period of slow mutation from one generation to the next, including a brief period where early hominids were still mating with trees.

We now know that humans are actually more closely related to fungus than anything in the plant kingdom, which is why we as a species find mushrooms so sexually attractive.  Right?  It’s not just us?

Q: A biped is a creature with two legs; a goose has two, and you have two, therefore you are a goose.  Why not?

A: It takes something besides legs to make a man or a goose.  The conclusion should have been, you are like a goose in one respect. (P. 81)

* Frederick J. Drake was far from innocent when it came to stealing jokes, but this example is one of the most flagrant.  It is in fact the climactic act-ending “topper” told by the popular vaudeville performer Humorless Heinrich, The German Who Explains Why Jokes Aren’t Funny.

Fig. 73 – Cover photo from Heinrich’s bestselling humor book “I Must Now Point Out the Mistake In Your Reasoning”

As originally told by Heinrich, the joke was also a reference to the then-cutting edge scientific discoveries made by Professor Bedwin Naverly of Princeton University and reported in his 1902 volume Notes On Surgical Limb Transplantation:

After much study, I have come to the definite conclusion that despite years of accepted scientific practice, goose limbs and human limbs are not the same thing.

It was a stunning blow to industrial goose farms, which had until then profitably supplied replacement limbs to surgeons, but a great day for amputees whose lack of success in making their new goose-limbs work had previously been ascribed to “not trying”.

Q: What girl did the most damage in the Civil War?

A: Minnie Ball. (P. 109)

* One of many formerly famous but now forgotten historical personages referenced in Conundrums New and Old, Minnie Ball “the Vicksburg Vamp” made her name as the premier heartbreaker of America’s greatest time of crisis.  As flirty as she was flighty, Ball traveled throughout Union and Confederate territory loving and leaving thousands of American men.  Numbered among her conquests were such luminaries as Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Philip Sheridan, J.E.B. Stuart, and Red Badge of Courage author Stephen Crane,  who wasn’t even born until six years after the war’s end.

Fig. 176 – Minnie Ball at the Battle of Chickamauga (not pictured, the 4,000 men killed during the battle)

Unfortunately, so overpowering were Ball’s charms and so devestating her method of ending relationships (which ranged from public sexual humiliation to telling William Tecumseh Sherman she valued him too much “as a friend”) that she became a serious setback to both armies’ efforts.   Worst of all was when General Meade failed to pursue Lee’s army after the Battle of Gettysburg, instead spending the day composing a romantic acrostic poem meant to woo back the minx, who had dumped him that morning.

Minnie Ball was eventually captured in a joint Union-Confederacy sting while telling future Supreme Court justice Private Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that he was “a really nice guy.”  She was hanged for treason in 1865, suspiciously soon after sending a letter to President Lincoln explaining she “loved him but wasn’t in love with him.”

The immediate upshot was the banning of love for U.S. soldiers, who remained emotionless killing machines until Jimmy Carter’s 1978 LSD-inspired “Strength Through Romance” Initiative.

Q: What do you put upon the table, cut but never eat?

A: A pack of cards. (P. 116)

* In 1903, Conundrums New And Old earned a place on every American’s mantle, bedside table, or horse-dashboard not just because of its sparkling humor, or the fact that the government distributed copies to every living citizen, but because it contained numerous advisories and lessons necessary for living a healthy life.  The joke listed here, in fact, was actually part of a larger campaign to end a centuries old, but newly dangerous habit: playing card eating.

Fig. 608 – “A Light Snack” by Paul Cezanne (CourtesyTucson Museum of Playing Card Art)

Since the invention of table-gaming in 1547 by the Earl of Crazyeights, playing cards had played the part of both recreation and snack.  Printed on thinly-shaved slices of wild boar flesh, whose natural stiffness and ability to retain ink earned it the nickname “The Gambling Pig,” playing cards were often consumed after a game had ended, or even mid-play if holding a particularly bad hand.

It goes without saying that this was the reason for the unpopularity of cards among Jews and Muslims, whose failure to find a suitable non-pork substitute has resulted in a hatred of the gentlemanly art of cardplayery that stubbornly continues to this day.

Unfortunately, the habit of card-eating was forced into extinction during the Great Poisoned Card Scare of 1893, when some anonymous madman managed to dose random card packs with tincture of arsenic, leading to the deaths of 17 old maids and gin rummies.  The culprit was never found, though conspiracy theorists have since theorized it was none other than President Grover Cleveland, insanely convinced by his securing a second non-consecutive term in the White House that he possessed godlike power and was beyond the laws of good and evil.

Fig. 67 – Cleveland in 1903, possibly transfixed by hellish visions of murder and madness

The end result of all this was the replacement of pork with paper, making cards inedible.  Still occasionally eaten by the elderly or foolish, warnings like the one provided above were necessary for years after the change.