By Peter M., Archives Assistant Student
A train halted a moment at the station and the traveler reached out, called a small boy, and said, “Son, here’s fifty cents. Get me a twenty-five cent sandwich and get one for yourself. Hurry up!”
Just as the train pulled out, the boy ran up to the window. “Here’s your quarter, mister,” he shouted. “They only had one sandwich.”
(GM War-Craftsman, June 1943)
This is one example of a joke I came across during my cataloguing of various documents here in the archives of the Oshawa Museum. I am a student that has been working here over the summer for just over a month now. I have always been fascinated by the stories that new artefacts or documents coming to us can tell, but one theme that has really caught my eye recently is jokes. Most of the documents I found containing jokes range throughout the 1940s. Some appeared in sections of official newsletters, while others were scribbled into the pages of students’ workbooks, as they were each encouraged to write a page full of all the jokes they could think of as a class exercise.
Johnny: (buying a ticket for New York).
Clerk: “Would you care to go by Buffalo?”
Johnny: “I don’t know. I’ve never ridden one.”
(GM War-Craftsman, October 1943)
The majority of the jokes I came across were gathered from a collection of General Motors newsletters called the War-Craftsman. The newsletters in the museum’s collection range from 1942-1946. These newsletters were a way of keeping the public informed of the events and contributions conducted by GM and its employees during World War II. There was a column present in nearly all of these newsletters titled “Gems of Comedy,” where numerous jokes were printed each month. Much like the rest of the War-Craftsman, these jokes served to keep spirits up, and inspire the public to keep moving forward during such trying times in our history.
At a recent shipyard launching, the woman who was to christen the boat was quite nervous.
“Do you have any questions, lady?” asked the shipyard manager, just before the ceremony.
“Yes,” she replied meekly. “How hard do I have to hit it to knock it into the water?”
(GM War-Craftsman, October 1943)
It is interesting to see how comedy has evolved through the ages. The jokes that I present you with are but a small few of the many that I found. Most of the jokes I did not understand, showing how some comedy doesn’t quite translate through the ages. Several others admittedly had themes that would be considered highly inappropriate by today’s standards, but they do serve show how society has changed, now having any jokes in publications today strive to be politically correct, while also maintaining the lightheartedness that was enjoyed by Oshawa citizens over sixty years ago.
Reporter: To what do you to attribute your great age?
Grandpa: The fact that I was born so long ago.
(GM War-Craftsman, December 1945)
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