Forget the punchline, such as it is… do you increase your red blood cells by getting blood from a chicken???
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Functionally, they’d be useless, but he just wants to get the count up, which it would accomplish…exceeeeept… Bird erythrocites are structurally different from those in mammals…so, at best, the ruse would be revealed…at worst, they’d think he had some weird disease.
You are expecting scientific accuracy from Mutt and Jeff?
But seriously, I suspect there was some strange urban legend/pop culture trope/misrepresentation at the time that’d it’d take a very serious historian to weed out.
The question “would getting blood from a chicken increase your red blood cells”, the answer is “yes”. Would it make a difference? Not really, unless an allergen was also conveyed.
I was expecting a payoff that he was now too chicken to enlist.
Shouldn’t it have been a Rhode Island Red? From that hen, I’d expect he’d get white cells.
it would raise the lab values (hemoglobin and hematocrit) whether it carried more oxygen or not. And since oxygen binds to iron in a chicken’s blood the same as in human blood, it would probably be somewhat functional until the cells were destroyed by the immune system.
This seems like a verbal joke rendered in comic form:
Fella goes to the doctor. Doctor says he needs a blood transfusion from a chicken, because [insert any old reason here]. Fella gets blood transfusion, and when he wakes up, clucks like a chicken. (Get ready for the punchline.) His friend, instead of being disappointed, says, “Chicken feed will bring him down!”
Would’ve brought the house down in Vaudeville times.
Everyone knows that if you receive blood in a transfusion you become whatever donated the blood. It happened to Laurel and Hardy: https://youtu.be/3pJ3G0_dV0A
Why would you get blood from a chicken?
Because you can’t get it from a turnip.
@ MiB – In an early episode of M*A*S*H, there was a patient who wanted to make sure that his transfusion would come from a white donor. After the operation, but before he woke up, Hawkeye (or Trapper) put shoe polish on his face and arms to teach him an anti-racism lesson.
Recalling the old, old joke about the woman who complained her husband thought he was a chicken, but decided not to take him to a psychiatrist because “We need the eggs.”
(That joke is probably even older than the earliest MUTT AND JEFF comics, and *that’s* OLD.)
This strikes me as something someone would try who wanted to avoid the draft. Okay, maybe just because I’m a child of the 60s.
“This strikes me as something someone would try who wanted to avoid the draft. ”
Well, BEFORE the 60’s, there was another war, and it was popular enough that people wanted to sign up, and people who did so were admired publicly and people who did not were viewed with some suspicion, perhaps even with hostility.
That’s why, for a while, all of our Presidents were veterans, and famous actors took time out from making movies (Yes, there’s overlap there… a certain President served during the war by… making movies.) The professional athletics careers of a number of athletes have asterisks for a couple of years, etc.
“That joke is probably even older than the earliest MUTT AND JEFF comics, and *that’s* OLD.”
It’s also funnier.
…
I remember when I first saw Annie Hall in the theaters. Woody Allen starts by saying “There’s there’s really old joke: ….” and then tells the “we need the eggs” joke and then segues into the psychology and metaphorical meaning of the joke. Well, just about everyone in the audience had heard the joke and didn’t react (which I assume was the intention– the joke comes in torturing the joke into an allegory of the human condition). But *one* person in the audience apparently had never heard it and burst out laughing hysterically alone in the theater all by himself.
Reminds me of Tex Avery’s “Crazy Mixed-Up Pup” (1954) where a medic gets “plasma” and “dog plasma” mixed up with predictable results.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Functionally, they’d be useless, but he just wants to get the count up, which it would accomplish…exceeeeept… Bird erythrocites are structurally different from those in mammals…so, at best, the ruse would be revealed…at worst, they’d think he had some weird disease.
Only medical related use I could find….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken-blood_therapy
But that doesn’t really help here.
(There are longer articles about it elsewhere)
You are expecting scientific accuracy from Mutt and Jeff?
But seriously, I suspect there was some strange urban legend/pop culture trope/misrepresentation at the time that’d it’d take a very serious historian to weed out.
The question “would getting blood from a chicken increase your red blood cells”, the answer is “yes”. Would it make a difference? Not really, unless an allergen was also conveyed.
I was expecting a payoff that he was now too chicken to enlist.
Shouldn’t it have been a Rhode Island Red? From that hen, I’d expect he’d get white cells.
it would raise the lab values (hemoglobin and hematocrit) whether it carried more oxygen or not. And since oxygen binds to iron in a chicken’s blood the same as in human blood, it would probably be somewhat functional until the cells were destroyed by the immune system.
This seems like a verbal joke rendered in comic form:
Fella goes to the doctor. Doctor says he needs a blood transfusion from a chicken, because [insert any old reason here]. Fella gets blood transfusion, and when he wakes up, clucks like a chicken. (Get ready for the punchline.) His friend, instead of being disappointed, says, “Chicken feed will bring him down!”
Would’ve brought the house down in Vaudeville times.
Everyone knows that if you receive blood in a transfusion you become whatever donated the blood. It happened to Laurel and Hardy: https://youtu.be/3pJ3G0_dV0A
Why would you get blood from a chicken?
Because you can’t get it from a turnip.
@ MiB – In an early episode of M*A*S*H, there was a patient who wanted to make sure that his transfusion would come from a white donor. After the operation, but before he woke up, Hawkeye (or Trapper) put shoe polish on his face and arms to teach him an anti-racism lesson.
Recalling the old, old joke about the woman who complained her husband thought he was a chicken, but decided not to take him to a psychiatrist because “We need the eggs.”
(That joke is probably even older than the earliest MUTT AND JEFF comics, and *that’s* OLD.)
This strikes me as something someone would try who wanted to avoid the draft. Okay, maybe just because I’m a child of the 60s.
“This strikes me as something someone would try who wanted to avoid the draft. ”
Well, BEFORE the 60’s, there was another war, and it was popular enough that people wanted to sign up, and people who did so were admired publicly and people who did not were viewed with some suspicion, perhaps even with hostility.
That’s why, for a while, all of our Presidents were veterans, and famous actors took time out from making movies (Yes, there’s overlap there… a certain President served during the war by… making movies.) The professional athletics careers of a number of athletes have asterisks for a couple of years, etc.
“That joke is probably even older than the earliest MUTT AND JEFF comics, and *that’s* OLD.”
It’s also funnier.
…
I remember when I first saw Annie Hall in the theaters. Woody Allen starts by saying “There’s there’s really old joke: ….” and then tells the “we need the eggs” joke and then segues into the psychology and metaphorical meaning of the joke. Well, just about everyone in the audience had heard the joke and didn’t react (which I assume was the intention– the joke comes in torturing the joke into an allegory of the human condition). But *one* person in the audience apparently had never heard it and burst out laughing hysterically alone in the theater all by himself.
Reminds me of Tex Avery’s “Crazy Mixed-Up Pup” (1954) where a medic gets “plasma” and “dog plasma” mixed up with predictable results.