Satire Before the Storm: When the Next War Was Only a Joke.

From Daphne Howlsmythe: My Screwball Debut in the War That Almost Wasn’t.

Darling, let me pitch you a scenario. Yes, I know it’s 2025, the Wi-Fi drops, the world burns, everyone’s gone gray before their time — but in my head it’s always 1938. Life is black-and-white, cocktails fizz like tonic, and if war insists on barging onto the set, then by heaven, I insist on screwball. Think Rosalind Russell with better shoes, Cary Grant failing to keep up, dialogue faster than a ticker tape. Ready? Lights, camera, satire!

Scene One: Princeton, 1936

We open on the Terrace Club. Boys in raccoon coats, gin rickeys sweating on the table. I sweep in — starry-eyed, sharp-tongued — and together we scribble a manifesto: “Future Veterans, Unite!” The gag? After the Great War, America promised its doughboys a bonus, shoved payment off until 1945, and when the Depression hit, the veterans marched on Washington in ’32. Cue the tank close-up: their own Army drove them out. Betrayal on the big screen! So in our picture, the Princeton boys — with me at their side — flip the script. If war is inevitable, pay us now, darling, with thirty years of interest. Cash now, carnage later. My line to camera: “Settle my funeral bill before you send me over there.”

Scene Two: Vassar Chorus Line

Smash cut to Vassar. The girls are cleverer than the boys (aren’t we always?), and they form the Gold Star Mothers of Future Wars. Now, the audience must know the set-up: after the last war, the government actually shipped bereaved mothers across the Atlantic to visit their sons’ graves — grief packaged as a state-funded tour, veils included. The Vassar chorus parodies it perfectly — booking their grief tours in advance. Picture me at the Cunard ticket counter, veil in hand: “One berth for me, darling, and don’t forget the black crepe, I’ll be needing it.” Gasps, giggles, cutaway to scandalized matrons.

Scene Three: Cemetery Spectacle & Musical Number

The next set: Drew University builds a cemetery, students stretched out in mock graves while professors solemnly take roll call of the future dead. And then, naturally — a musical number! Spotlight on Georgetown. Glasses clink, the band strikes up Over There, only it’s rewritten, darling, parody lyrics spilling like champagne bubbles:

Fall in line — fall in line,

Now’s the time — now’s the time.

To collect our bonus

That Franklin D. will loan us…

And the chorus crescendos:

So raise your glasses and give three cheers

For the war that’s comin’ to take us hummin’

And we won’t be there ’til it’s over, over here

The crowd roars. Satire set to a marching tune, and it lands better than any sermon.

Scene Four: Chaplains, Correspondents, and the Berkeley Shot

Cut to the divinity students — they’ve become the Chaplains of Future Wars, rehearsing graveside sermons for soldiers not yet dead. Journalism majors hammer typewriters as the Correspondents of Future Wars, drafting atrocity stories on blank paper. The whole cast salutes, arm out, palm up, beggar-style. Cue the Busby Berkeley overhead shot: a hundred hands in perfect sync, not for honor but for cash.

Scene Five: Antagonists Enter, Cameo Appears

Enter the straight men, the interventionists: congressmen puffing like W.C. Fields with heartburn, veterans’ groups sputtering with outrage, Hearst reporters chasing Bolsheviks under raccoon coats. My cue, naturally, is to sigh, wave a handkerchief, and murmur, “The only Red here is in their cheeks.” Which is the real joke, darling, because give it a few reels and the Reds themselves will turn isolationist — Stalin invades Poland, they suddenly want America kept out at all costs. And then, the cameo: Eleanor Roosevelt herself strolls into frame, tosses off the line of the picture — “I think it’s just as funny as it can be.” Curtain, applause, champagne corks.

Scene Six: The Big Reveal

But here’s the secret the audience in 1936 already knows: this isn’t just froth. It’s satire with teeth. America does not want another war. Legacy families have already buried their sons from WWI, immigrants have just escaped Europe’s quarrels, and nobody in the theater wants to see another draft notice tucked into the popcorn box. The comedy plays, but underneath it hums the truth: stay out.

Scene Seven: The Fast-Forward Reel

And then, darling, the projector whirs and stutters, the calendar pages flip, and suddenly it looks suspiciously like today. The costumes are different, but the dialogue hasn’t changed. Yesterday’s line was “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” Today’s is “Defend Democracy Abroad.” Same script, new cast. America still plays the banker, still props up the scenery, still foots the bill for someone else’s quarrel.

Final Reel: The Twist Ending

And now, darlings, the final twist. You thought I was pitching a screwball farce, didn’t you? Chiffon, cocktails, pratfalls, satire dressed up for RKO. But here’s the kicker: every antic I’ve described — the mock cemeteries, the grief tours booked in advance, the parody anthems, the Chaplains and Correspondents saluting beggar-style, Eleanor’s cameo — every last antic was real.

History, not Hollywood, wrote this screwball script. It’s all recorded, solemn as you please, in Paul Dickson’s The Rise of the G.I. Army, 1940–1941.

The farce was real. And that is why the joke still stings.

—Daphne Howlsmythe, Fashion, Food, and Pet Care Correspondent,

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