More from The Box of Old Stuff, a comic painting by one William Grote, “Courtesy Life Pub. Co.” and evidently given away to to good customers of a toothpaste once famous in Britain and North America, Forhan’s for the Gums.

I spent quite a while in the Google library trying to track down Grote and the origins of this particular drawing. Forhan artefacts are everywhere — millions of people are selling the company’s magazine and newspaper ads from the 1920s and even earlier, for anywhere from $4 to $16.

These ads are pretty funny to modern eyes, though they do have a strange resonance in the US Homeland Security alerts. Four out of five readers were warned that horrible gum disease was poised to strike unless they scrubbed their teeth with RH Forhan’s miracle cream.

There was no sign of either Grote or his “Painless Dentist” cartoon until I isolated the search to “Liar”, and finally found them both on eBay — the artwork taking the form of a tin sign, no less, and on offer for $2.99.

No date given, and there’s none on my cardboard version either, but 1923 seems to have been the heyday of Forhan’s marketing. Ohio State University has a Treasury of Fine Art that has in turn a Cartoon Research Library, and for all of that, all it has to say about the very similar artwork shown here is “Miscellaneous Vintage … Painless Dentist. Revenge.”

The kid’s spreading banana peels around outside the office door. The artist’s signature is barely legible, but it’s not Grote’s.

Forhan’s, which was also a major sponsor of radio shows, pitched its “unique” ability to massage the gums as well as clean the teeth, and promised that twice-daily use would “reduce the threat” of gingivitis for 95% of users in 30 days.

By 1928 both Forhan’s and the makers of Squibb’s Dental Cream were zeroing on mouth acids as the enemy, unleashing pyorrhaea to “destroy happiness”. Forhan’s advised that gums needed exercise so they wouldn’t become “lazy”, distributed a manual with every tube and invited female customers to also send for a copy of “Kathryn Murray’s Facial Exercises” to ward off wrinkles.

And yet somehow, in 1940, a consumer agency was giving Forhan’s a “not acceptable” rating, saying the dental cream (or was it talking about the ads?) was “excessively abrasive” and the “gum claims objectionable”.

Anyway, all that googling also turned up Allan Sherman, the great singing funnyman most famous for “Hello Muddha, Hello Fadduh!” I spent the rest of the day with the chorus going through my head (”Take me home, oh muddah, faddah, take me home, I hate Grenada”), but I’d never heard of Sherman’s “The Painless Dentist Song”.

Don’t be unwilling,
It’s just a filling,
I’m simply drilling to dig a little pit.
Don’t fight Miss Klinger, or bite her finger
And now while I change the drill you can spit …

I hum while you’re bleeding;
It takes your mind off
The things I grind off …

They’ll be a puffiness around your cheeks,
You’ll have to eat soft food for three more weeks,
And if you’ll kindly stop those ghastly shrieks,
I’m through.

It’s no Camp Grenada song, but for better or worse, it’s on YouTube.