Culture shock: how joy buzzers, trick chairs, and other prank devices helped manufacture the post-industrial American male.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Book review

Catalog No. 439: Burlesque Paraphernalia and Side Degree Specialties and Costumes, edited by Gary Groth, Fantagraphics, 240 pages, $22.99

THE OSTENSIBLE purpose of the DeMoulin Patent Lung Tester, a plain-looking box with a nickel-plated mouthpiece and a calibrated dial on its face, was to measure a man's lung capacity. Its real purpose was to measure a man's ability to maintain his composure after being made the butt of a joke. When an unsuspecting mark blew into it, a .32 caliber blank cartridge exploded and a blast of flour hit him squarely in the face.

Along with hundreds of similar devices, the Lung Tester appears in Catalog No. 439: Burlesque Paraphernalia and Side Degree Specialties and Costumes. Originally published in 1930 by DeMoulin Bros. & Co., this strange volume has been newly reprinted by Fantagraphics Books. Like the more iconic Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog, it illuminates its moment in American history as deftly and instructively as any novelist has ever done.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Today left-leaning progressives insist our consumerist culture is not only trashing the planet but leaving us less happy than earlier generations of Americans. Conservative Christians tell us we cannot find meaning or purpose in mere material abundance but must make God the center of our lives, like our Founding Fathers did. Our shopping orgies and wanton spending habits have purportedly left us broke, isolated, and starving for richer friendships, deeper community ties, a higher degree of civic engagement than Groupon can deliver.

But look at how our supposedly more enlightened forebears created the social connectedness we long for. DeMoulin Bros. & Co. got its start in 1893, when 31-year-old Ed DeMoulin of Greenville, Illinois, began making ceremonial axes for the Modern Woodmen of America, a fraternal benefit organization whose primary purpose was to provide life insurance for its brotherhood. A year later, the organization's leader asked DeMoulin if he had any ideas that might help boost membership.

The initiation rites of long-standing secret societies like the Freemasons and Odd Fellows were elaborate, often solemn affairs. According to John Goldsmith, who maintains a museum devoted to the DeMoulin Brothers, Ed DeMoulin believed that the Modern Woodmen could attract more members by making their initiation rites more entertaining. To this end, Ed devised a gag in which the inductee was commanded to place his hand in what appeared to be a...