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Learning Day: Exo-Vaticana, Part 4
Author: Lydia Bugg
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Learning Day: Exo-Vaticana, Part 3
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Learning Day: Exo-Vaticana, Part 2
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Learning Day: Exo-Vaticana, Part 1
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!
Are you a man who wants to explain to women how to improve themselves but can’t get them to stop running away from you on the street for some reason? Why not try putting all of your super-cool ideas into one self-published self-help book with a title that covers pretty much anything a girl or woman could ever need help with? Self-Improvement, Self-Defense, Self-Help, Self-Immolation, Selfie Stick, How To Remove From Eyeball, etc…
I can’t say for sure that Khelen Nicole is a pen name being used by a man to distribute this book, but I have pretty good reasons to believe it is, which we’ll get to later. For now, you have to trust me. I know, that might be difficult for you after all of the terrifying things I’ve introduced you to on this website, but I promise: there’s a reason.
The synopsis for this book is a journey. It sums up over fifty percent of the book in two sentences and then gives us the banger statement that, “Women are physically weaker than men, hence, numerous laws have been enacted for their welfare, protection, and happiness.” Which makes it sound like all laws are for women. If women didn’t exist, society would just be a lawless stab fest with an occasional break for naps and nachos. I feel like men enjoy not being attacked most of the time too, but sure. Let’s move on. Here’s the book’s extremely long description:
The second suspicious thing I noticed was how “Khelen” uses old-timey phrases like “pocket money” in a post-pocket society. We now live in a world where it’s so rare for women’s clothes to come with pockets, we’re morally obligated to mention them whenever someone compliments our outfit. And “Khelen’s” book was published in 2019– a full two decades after female fashion designers hunted the last pocket to extinction.
It’s also not written from any particular perspective. Usually, self-help books and self-defense books draw heavily from the life of the author. They need to tell you why they’re an expert in this field so you know why you should take their advice. If I wrote a book called How To Fix Cars, Probably, IDK: My Best Guess About What Is Going On In Cars, you wouldn’t buy it, as I’ve not proven myself to be an authority on the subject matter. If I wrote one called Pocket? The Fuck is a Pocket!?: A Female Perspective on Carryin’ Shit, you’d be sure of my expertise.
The only time a direct reference to the writer of the book appears is in the second-to-last sentence when they say, “Need to really work on myself,” but I think that snuck in there by accident. It’s also the truest statement in the book; I would very much agree that the person who wrote it does need to really work on themselves!
This confusion of tense and writing style continues inside the book. It starts with a slight rewrite of the book’s description and then pretty much immediately launches into a voice that is so different from all of that, whatever it is… Need to really work on myself. It becomes an entirely different book!
It’s like the person writing this was possessed by a ghost who died because of their terrible diet. The first part of the book, labeled “Self-Improvement, Self-Help, Self-Care” immediately starts with diet advice that is clearly out of date and also directed specifically at teenagers. It advises not to have too many snacks at “the drugstore” after school and tells you to ask your mom if you can drink coffee in the morning. The rest of the diet suggests a lot of fruit, cottage cheese, hard boiled eggs, and conssome, which is ’50s-speak for bland soup.
I was surprised it didn’t throw in a classic, “Have a cool and refreshing Lucky Strike once a day to keep your body healthy!” Again, the cover says this book was written in 2019, but there’s a section on how to properly fit a girdle.
Later in the book, a girl mows the lawn, and the lawnmower is so unrecognizable to me as a lawnmower that I thought she had lost control of her Segway.
There’s a picture of a girl waiting for a date by the telephone and the telephone I only recognized because of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It looks more like a vibrator than a telephone to me. Need to really work on myself.
Now very suspicious, I decided to run some of the text through a plagiarism checker, and I learned that, in a way, I was wrong about this book being written by a man. It was written by famous teen model Betty Cornell in 1960. It’s actually called Betty Cornell’s Teenage Popularity Guide. Some audacious fucker took a 1960s self-help book and added karate to it.
“Lydia Holmes and the Mystery of What the Hell is a Girdle Again?” was not that difficult to solve! I know plagiarism on self-publishing platforms is a big issue, and scammers are always finding sneaky new ways to make money off of other people’s work, but the combination of this particular 59-year-old book plus karate is especially nuts to me.
On the author’s amazon page, I saw they had written a few other books about self-defense and assumed what I had stumbled across was an instance of book stuffing. Authors on Kindle Unlimited are paid per page read of their books, so some writers will stuff an entire book or two into the back of their book in hopes that a reader will just keep reading through their entire 3,000 page opus and net the author a cool eleven cents. Or, they’ll put a deceptive link in the first chapter that takes the reader to the end of the book, tricking their e-reader into reporting to Amazon they read the whole thing. They’re tricking you into tricking a robot into paying them less than a tenth of what they would have earned mowing lawns with a Segway.
I figured this guy wrote a self-defense-for-women book and wanted to make it longer, so he stole a book from the 1960s and stuck it in front of his self-defense tips. Wild choice, but I get the incentive. However, it turns out the second half of the book is also fully plagiarized! Want to know what gave it away? Check out this image of a guy about to get a stylish, vintage ass whooping. He put on his best bow tie just to hit this lady! Man, those were the days.
My trusty (and free) plagiarism checker informed me that the second half of the book is actually The Science Of Self-Defense For Girls And Women by Professor Henry Seishiro Okazaki, published in 1929. Somehow someone looked at these two books and decided that they could in some way be convincingly woven together to create a guide for teaching modern women in the year of our lord 2019 how to look good and kick a man in the dick. By the way, How To Kick A Man In The Dick And Look Good Doing It is another book I’m highly qualified to write.
What’s really funny to me is that even though the author could have maximized their potential income from this book by making it as long as possible, they seemed to have gotten bored with copying the self-defense part, possibly because they had to take out all of the mentions of the author and how he came to invent these self-defense moves. The descriptions of what’s going on in the photos are pretty bare, and sometimes confusing.
Getting attacked by a man seems like it used to be way more polite. There’s a whole section on ways to get out of false handshakes, which makes me think that used to be a big problem? Were men constantly luring women into handshakes and then attacking them? “Hello, ma’am. I am Professor Henry Seishiro Okazaki. It’s very nice to… KARATE YOU!”
I’m curious how the author thought this would work? I can’t imagine anyone on earth being gullible enough to get a page into this and not realize it’s super dated. Unless you’re in some sort of Blast From The Past, fresh from an underground bunker situation starring Brendan Fraser, the thing going on here is immediately obvious. So there’s no way this person could possibly be making money off this book, right?
Maybe? Probably? Yet, it seems like this wasn’t a one time project. The same author has several other books on Amazon that are, um, I don’t know, a little suspicious in some way?
This book cover screams written in 2019 to me. It says it right on the bottom! Sure, the title reads like it was purposely designed to trick me into thinking I’m having a stroke, but other than that, it’s definitely a modern book! So is this very informative book by the same author, also for sure written in 2019, about two giants getting knee punched by a tiny guy.
Some of these books may be old enough to be in the public domain, but even if something is public domain, you can’t add your name and the current year to the cover and call it a whole new book. I mean, I guess no one can stop you? Totally unrelated, I just dropped a new book. It’s called Romeo and Juliet by Lydia Bugg (2021); look for it soon on Amazon! It’s about menstrual belt repair and river boat etiquette!
So I went into this thinking it was a book written by a dude who wanted to tell women how to lose weight by having thinner bones and eating cottage cheese until we die of malnourishment, but it actually turned out to be somehow weirder and scammier than that? Which is honestly impressive.
