This being April Fool’s Month (why keep it confined to merely one day?), I’m picking up from my April 1 post of an 1880s amateur comic strip, to show here what even anonymous amateurs could do in the Good Old Days to earn some real money — Naughty, Risque Comics!

Below is a circa 1904-1915 comic pamphlet titled What Happy Saw Through the Keyhole in the Door. I regard this parody of Frederick Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan, as an early predecessor of the later, far more hardcore tijuana bible pamphlets of the 1920s through 1950s, in which comics characters, movie stars, and public figures of the day were depicted in X-Rated comic satires, sold under-the-counter in drug stores, hardware stores, gas stations, etc. After the 1950s, tijuana bibles could be argued to have evolved into the underground comics of the 1960s/70s counter-culture movement.

The “circa 1904-1915″ date, is an educated guess. Happy Hooligan began publication in 1900. In art style and theme, in what the woman behind the keyhole in the door is shown wearing, the above booklet matches similarly themed post cards & other items of that time. For comparison, see the below tin platelets, part of sets sold (surreptitiously) at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair (one of which parodies yet another Opper comic strip — Alphonse & Gaston).

Also for Comparison, see this 1903 stereoview published by William H. Rau, in Philadelphia. It is the third card in his six-card peeking-though-a-keyhole set, In Her Boudoir.

By the post-WW I era of flappers and truly explicit comic parodies, What Happy Saw Through the Keyhole in the Door simply would have been too genteel to “do it” for anyone but Gramps.

The turn-of-the-20th-century naughtiness of peeking through a keyhole, is of course, merely a continuance of yet still earlier such motifs, such as shown in the below trade cards published in 1882, by Mrs. Nugent & Co., New York (real name, or a play on “New Gent”?)…

…and in this pair of circa 1860s hand-colored stereoview cards, which in full glorious 3-D color showed 19th century viewers not only a man attempting to peek in on a pair of young women, but also the consequences of getting caught by his victims.

Special Thanks to Melody D. Davis, PhD, from whose collection the stereoviews in this post were scanned.

Doug Wheeler

Frederick Burr Opper