Author: Lydia Bugg

We like to have fun here at 1900Hotdog. We like it so friggin’ much we’re dedicating a whole week to discussing those daffy, zany, tomfoolery-filled, hijinks-having Golden Age comics. Still, it’s important we remember that during the age when these comics were thriving, some people were suffering, and those people were the old white men who had to deal with Dizzy Dames! Screwballs in Skirts!

It was 1952, the good old days when men were so magically horny they could sniff your pantyhose through your television. When women constantly went around screaming FRESH at them like they were in a guerilla Subway commercial. That man doesn’t look fresh at all! He’s at least forty years old.

Dizzy Dames is amazing. A perfect no bullshit goddamn shrine to why we need diversity in comedy writing rooms. This anthology comic about women getting into shenanigans was written by two or three white dudes with nine ideas between them, and they just recycled those jokes over and over again. Like most titles in the ’40s and ’50s, it’s an anthology comic, so there are usually five stories in each issue. I read twenty-five stories, there were only nine jokes in them, and they were all very dumb. These are the nine jokes the Dizzy Dames writers think are comedy gold: 

They take these classic japes and weave them around tales of women falsely accusing men of wronging them in some way. It’s important to remember the man has done nothing wrong! It’s always the woman’s fault. The woman has merely misunderstood a perfectly rational man and is flying off the handle with her big lady emotions and doubling down on how terrible the man has been. Then sometimes other men get involved and get angry at the first guy who pissed off this crazy broad but don’t worry– eventually, the police always show up, or on rare occasions, a rational woman comes along to make it clear that if the man didn’t hit you, he did nothing wrong!

“What’s the fuss about, blowjob lips? A little stick hittin’ and child abandonment?”

“Well, from one screwball-in-a-skirt to another, I don’t believe you or have any questions!”

Look at these women and their crocodile tears, trying to ruin perfectly respectable men with their crazy eye juice tricks. You won’t believe how the men in these comics suffer at the hands of women! Just look, look at what Moronica did to respectable businessman Tony Spumoni! 

He’s not even sure he’s-a Tony Spumoni! He could be-a anyone! Moronica ravaged this man’s life with her stupidity, something that happens over and over again in these comics. If there’s a main character in Dizzy Dames, it’s Moronica. She does it all. She’s very dumb, doesn’t understand metaphors, makes animals super horny, and makes her boss wish he was dead. Like, out loud:

“I wish I was dead!” This hilarious screwball punchline is used over and over again in this comic. It’s like fireworks at the end of a baseball game on the fourth of July. You know it’s coming, but you’re still like, oh yeah baby, there it is when it shows up. 

Anyway, back to Moronica. Her two main tasks in the comic are to serve as a device for making animals horny, because again so funny, and to look for a job. If the comic had gone on longer, they probably would have found a way to give her a job making animals horny, and the writers would have absolutely pooped their pants in joy. 

Think how happy local sex pest, Charlie Gunkwhistle, will be when he hears Moronica mentioned him with her dying breath.

“Miss… Moronica? Your test results came back… well, let’s just say they are astonishing. This question is going to sound unusual, but have you recently traded literal gallons of mouth and eyeball fluid with a monkey?”

When Moronica falls into a lake, even the fish swim up and kiss her. Maybe some of these animals have more wholesome intentions with Moronica, but others most definitely don’t:

I think the implication here is that Moronica is going to JO those chickens? Or she already attempted to? And one of them is into it, but the other’s unsure? That’s honestly the least nasty version of what I think could possibly be going on in this cover. (Sean, you grew up on a chicken farm. If I am misunderstanding a very wholesome joke that’s not about pulling the semen out of chickens and putting it in a bucket, please cut this part.)

Editor’s Note: Oh, she’s definitely jerking off those chickens, but the joke doesn’t work because they’re girls and the farmer is trying to stop it. He’d be so into this. When you hire a bikini girl farmhand and she cheerfully heads off to try masturbating every animal, real farmers call that a Best Case Scenario. Anyway, assuming the author knows what chickens are, this dizzy dame has filled at least one previous bucket with shit she cranked out of those hens’ cloacas. Which means I’ve come around on it. I now love this joke.

Monica gets into scrapes with these horny animals all the time. Like, once a monkey climbed into her window, and she thought it was a little boy, so she tried to adopt it! Because as we all know, if you put clothes on a monkey, it’s pretty much indistinguishable from a person. It’s not just Moronica who can’t tell it’s a monkey. Her landlady sees the monkey and thinks he’s a short guy she’s pretending is her little brother so she can sneak him into her room and have sex with him. 

Eventually, the landlady realizes he’s a monkey because he swings from a chandelier. Another weird Dizzy Dames trope is that all monkeys must hang from chandeliers. If they do it by their hands, you still can’t tell it’s a monkey, though.

She says humans don’t swing from chandeliers like that because there’s another story in a different Dizzy Dames book where Screwball Sally, another recurring character, doesn’t have a date to a dance, so she goes to the pound, adopts an ape, puts a suit on it and brings it to the dance. Everyone there is like, “Wow, your date is really tall and hot!” and not like, “That’s an ape!” Which is honestly pretty funny. Maybe there’s something to this funny, horny animals thing after all!

“Nice little date, Gracie. Yeah, I know you can hear me, you piece of shit. Fuck you. Human-ass bitch. You make Gracie look silly.”

See, that’s how a person swings from a chandelier, not a monkey. If you want to conceal the fact that you’re a monkey in people’s clothes, you need to swing from the chandelier with your arms. If you take nothing else away from Dizzy Dames, I hope you learn that important lesson. 

If you think Moronica and Suzy Screwball’s stories are pretty similar, you would be correct. Moronica accidentally adopts the organ grinder’s monkey, not realizing he’s a monkey, and gets found out by her landlady and the organ grinder (respectable businessman Tony Spumoni) after the monkey hangs from the chandelier. This culminates in a pretty dark ending where Moronica is forced to become the organ grinder’s new monkey. She thinks this is a good job!

Jesus. I mean, Moronica is a monster, but that is a pretty dark fate. It’s hard to get a handle on the rules in Dizzy Dames, but generally men are allowed to do whatever they want to women when it comes to Monkey Law. Like how a policeman can force you to become someone’s sex(?) worker if you lose their monkey. Or in this example, you’ll see how you can’t legally throw a monkey out of a dance, but you can absolutely give his human date “the rush.”

Luckily, in this case, her ape date stepped in and kicked all of their asses before they could sentence Sal to “the rush” by the authority given to them by Monkey Law. Go ape date! Then all of her friends get super horny for the strong monkey. THE END. I said THE END.

Was this really what the world was like in the fifties? Did you decide who to date by who could beat up the most other men? Don’t answer. Just battle for me.

Maybe it just felt like those were the rules to the guys who wrote this because they weren’t getting laid? I hate this comic so much, and I hope the writers are still alive so that can hurt their feelings. Now seems like a good time to transition into a Hitting Women Is Funny montage. That’s why they call it a punchline, kids! Picture this set to the Benny Hill music, I guess?

“Good luck fixing that pelvis with no job!”

“And good luck finding a job without that pelvis!”

“I’m talking about THAT pelvis! The one I’m forcefully TOUCHING!”

“It says right there on the sign– volunteer sales clerks GET FUCKED UP!”

Oof, yikes. That was a lot. Here’s a palate cleanser of a nice, soothing doll advertisement. Except the doll looks like a necromancer standing over a grave yelling, “RISE MY MIDNIGHT CHILDREN! Feast on my rubber wonderskin.”

Ok, ok, I’m sorry. I had a choice of what comic I could pick for golden-age comic week, and I picked Dizzy Dames. I believe my exact wording was: 

Like an IDIOT. No one told me I had to do lady comics. I was given many available options, and I said, this is what I want, please. I choose this! If I could go back in time, I might do it differently. I might say to myself, “You know Agnes,” which is a fun nickname I have for myself. I’d say, “Agnes, this comic has a recurring character named Man Huntin’ Minnie, who is so ugly that when she sees herself in the mirror, she yells YAAAAAAAAAGH!“

All of her friends are mean to her because she is so ugly. They are embarrassed by her mere presence but do nothing to help her look better.

She is mistaken for a telegraph pole and a building gargoyle by people whose job it is to pick those things up and carry them away?

During the gargoyle incident, she thinks she’s been kidnapped, and she’s thrilled! Overjoyed!

And you still won’t hate her as much as you hate Moronica for what she did to poor “respectable businessman Tony Spumoni!” My mind has been warped in some way by this comic! I feel so sorry for these poor helpless men that Moronica made so morose.

The many police officers who legally couldn’t take her to prison because she’s too stupid. That’s the special law for women, apparently. God, the fifties were nuts. 

This dame is too dizzy to follow our laws! An airtight alibi!

Monica is so dumb she could destroy our entire economy. No greater villain has ever existed in comics. Do you think Doctor Doom is bad? Fools! Quiver in fear before this dumb woman.

So yeah, I think this has ruined me. Thanks for your Patreon donations! Happy Golden Age Week! Hope you enjoy the wacky comics!