40-01-24 Y.Y. Flirch Elected Best-looking Man

STARRING: ART VAN HARVEY, BERNARDINE FLYNN AND BILL IDELSON

Lodge muckity-muck Y.Y. Flirch is in town and he's asked Vic to write a piece for the lodge magazine, farm journals and for the Covington, Kentucky newspaper that tells of him winning the award of the "Best-looking Man in the Western Side of Lester, Nebraska."

You can sense that Vic doesn't want the job (favor) but to be friendly and to cow tow to Flirch (a fellow Exalted Big Dipper), he accepts the responsibility.

Eventually this changes, since Flirch calls Vic four times during the episode, ruffling Vic's feathers. By the time the episode ends, Vic has told Flirch he can "Take his good looks and throw them in the creek" and that he's "Not writing any article."

Here are all four telephone calls from Flirch (edited): {{{{HEAR}}}

MIS' CROWE SAYS:
Y.Y. Flirch wins a contest and Vic is stuck writing a short, breezy article about it.

Occasionally we are treated to a glimpse into the true nature of Vic’s Lodge friends. Usually, we have to rely on Vic’s appraisal of them, which is usually wholly positive. When we actually get to see them interacting with the characters, or when we find out information about their personal lives, we see that a lot of them are, frankly, fatheads. This time, Flirch’s antics become so irritating that Vic is forced to tell Flirch off in front of Sade (not before reciting the official lodge greeting, though, of course). This doubtless confirms all of her worst suspicions about “them Lodge fellas.”
Flirch has been given the honor of “best-looking man on the west side of Lester, Nebraska.” Sade cannot stop herself from expressing her own opinion of Y.Y. Flirch’s looks. Vic politely refrains from responding to any of this, however.

I’m uncertain whether Y.Y.’s hometown is Lester, Nebraska (which would be a fictional town) or Leicester,  Nebraska (a real town, which as of 2000 had a population of around 400). If it’s the latter, it’s hard to say how big the town would have been in 1940, since so many small Midwestern towns have shrunk drastically since the days of the railroads and steamboats. But it adds to my enjoyment of the episode to think of Y.Y. being voted best-looking man on the west side of a town of 400 people…)

SEE THE SCRIPT (transcribed by Lydia Crowe)

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Flirch is no doubt full of himself but Vic's article says just the opposite: {{{HEAR}}}

Trivia:

+ Rush's friend, Willis Rohrback is mentioned for the first time in the existing audio.  He has a brother.

+ Flirch is on his way to Covington, Kentucky and is currently staying at the Bright Kentucky Hotel. (I'm surprised Vic didn't offer to put him up at his house.)

+ Flirch was also deemed the man with the "Longest eyelashes on the Western Side of Lester, Nebraska."

+ Near the end of the episode, Vic calls Flirch both a "half-wit" and a "slob."

FLIRCH MAY REALLY BE A HALFWIT

Despite the fact that Flirch is a big muckity-muck in the lodge and is the best-looking man in the Western side of Lester, Nebraska, we find out in a later episode that he lives in a tent in a parking lot. - Jimbo

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