Monday, August 19th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
The so-called “Tijuana Bibles” that had their pornographic heyday in the 1930s mostly featured parody versions of comic strip characters from comic strips that are long forgotten today. Fortunately, the action in these dirty little books is timeless, featuring delightfully rude filth that we have no trouble recognizing. The character “Boots” in this one was a bit of a flapper in Boots and Her Buddies, the presumably staid and boring 1924 newspaper strip by Edgar Martin. When we meet Boots’s pornographic alter ego, she’s picking up a small town yokel and offering to show him a good time:
He’s totally game: “Hot darn it, let’s go!” I guess street corners outside the local train station were the fuck pal hookup hot spots of their day. Where else was a bored and horny flapper chick looking for a good time supposed to go?
Whatever he thought or hoped was going to happen once he got back to his new flapper friend’s place, her direct dialog and especially her hand down the front of his pants quickly dispels all ambiguity. But yokel or not, he’s still a little bit worried that the lady might have an “old gent” who could walk in and disapprove of their sport:
Our man doesn’t need to be told twice. But even while laying some creditable pipe, he’s not so much the yokel that he doesn’t wonder: why him, exactly?
Some things don’t change across most of 100 years, and the ability of the average male ego to swallow implausibly large lumps of flattery is one of those immutables. She calls him “Daddy” and “a great big handsome brute” and sure, of course, it all makes sense!
The thing about these 8-pagers is that they were pornographic comics. And the “country bumpkin” yokel used to be a highly comic figure among city folk. Much of the comedy in this short book is wondering when the yokel will finally realize that his friendly city-girl fuckbuddy has a mercenary motive, which every worldly person would have understood from the stereotypical offer of a “real good time” in the first panel. His impenetrable lack of comprehension does not even give way when she matter-of-factly calls him a john. Perhaps that’s not a word they use in Oshkosh?
Finally she gets around to the the straightforward ask. Sometimes with the slow ones you have to be direct. “How about fifty dollars?”
And the joke slides home! “Gosh, no! Don’t give me money!” Nobody could be this stupid… or could they?
I’m not sure whether the entire joke is about the stupid yokel who never understood that he was with a sex worker, or whether there’s a less pleasant undertone. Is there a layer where we are supposed to wonder if the “yokel” was playing dumb the whole time, to take advantage of Boots and her “payment after services” business model?
