She Charms Him Out Of Spanking Her Every Time
Meet Lars, the Scandahoovian husband who has marital problems. Spanking his wife is turning out not to be the obvious solution he thought it was:
This cartoon and joke are from the February 1930 Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang pulp magazine. The joke is actually fairly cute, but I don’t enjoy the attempts to capture non-standard speech in non-standard spelling that we always see in very old/stale ethnic jokes. So here’s the joke transcribed into more standard English:
Lars Fingerson was having trouble with his wife. He went to see Deacon Miller.
“Deacon”, he said, “I think I got to get a divorce from Gonver. She’s been acting like a young kid. She got sore at me; she’s throwing things around and making faces at me. I got to have a divorce.”
“Oh, Lars,” said the deacon, “I wouldn’t do that. Why don’t you treat her as you would a kid? If she doesn’t behave, turn her over and give her a good spanking.””
“Ah, deacon,” Lars wept. “That’s no good. I tried that, but every time I get her on my lap to give her a good licking, I ain’t mad no more!”
In this particular case, I can’t really take offense. The accent that the author tries to convey is obviously Swedish or Norwegian, and as those two ethnic groups have never faced serious discrimination, it is not really “punching down”.
I’m neither, so I won’t argue with you, but my sense of history is that early in the big wave of Scandinavian immigration to the upper Midwest, they faced discrimination akin to that faced by Polish immigrants (see “Polack jokes”) or Irishmen (“No Irish need apply.”) How serious it may have been is beyond my ability to evaluate.