Book Report: The Playboy Book of Humor and Satire (1967)

Book coverThis book has been languishing on the most ignored to-read bookshelf at Nogglestead, the small little bookshelf in the hall between our offices. The three full-sized bookshelves on the opposite wall command the attention when I’m looking for something to read, and so I rarely draw a book from there. Even when I’ve looked at that shelf for something to read, I’ve sometimes considered this volume, but it’s a bit of a chonker–it’s 400 pages, and with Playboy on the cover, it’s not like I was going to carry this book to the dojo or to church. I guess I was saving it up for just the right moment when I would want to read it. Which finally arrived.

The book contains over 30 humorous articles and essays that appeared in the magazine up to the middle 1960s. Some of the articles are about sex, but not all of them. Remember, younglings, back in the 1960s, Playboy was a premier literary magazine as well as a place to see bazingas.

So this book includes pieces by Woody Allen, Allan Sherman, Art Buchwald (who must have been young once, ainna?), Jean Shepherd, and others. And aside from Art Buchwald, I could hear the enumerated authors’ voices in my head as I read (after all, I did listen to Pomp and Circumstance, a collection of Shepherd’s radio programs, in 2019). In searching for the link to the musings on that radio program collection, I externally remembered that Shepherd Mead, also in this book, was the author of How To Succeed In Business Without Trying (which I have not seen or read) as well as How to Live Like a Lord Without Trying (which I have read). So, clearly, I am in the target demographic of this book although I was born five years after it was published.

Overall, an up and down collection. Some pieces are funnier than others. Some rely on being an insider on publishing or movie-making. I was going to say that a few of them are dated, but, c’mon, man, very few overtly political sneers and no mentions of modern technologies or mindsets, so they’re all dated, but some of them fall into the anachronisms of my lived experience. I am sure that if you handed this to a kid today, he wouldn’t be scandalized because he wouldn’t know what Playboy represented in the 20th century, and he probably would not understand much of the humor within the book anyway. Not that he would want to read it. Not if there was a good, or any, TikTok or YouTube video available.

Which is unfortunate.

At any rate, Playboy collections from the 1960s are probably worth picking up even if they don’t have pictures. So one can remember a time where men aspired to some sophistication or at least think wistfully about a time when men might have aspired to some sophistication but were probably mostly all about the bazingas.

Although the cover art, man. That gives me nightmares.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

1 thought on “Book Report: The Playboy Book of Humor and Satire (1967)

Comments are closed.