Best of
Humor

1975

Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman


George Herriman - 1975
    During its 31 year run, it was enormously popular with the public and with many writers, artists, and intellectuals of the time. An innovative cartoon masterpiece and the first major biographical work on the artist himself.

The Doonesbury Chronicles


G.B. Trudeau - 1975
    In Washington, where Doonesbury is required reading, requests for original strips have come from White House aides, senators, congressmen, and—remarkably—most of the major Watergate conspirators whose maladventures gave the strip grist for some of its most celebrated moments."There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington: the electronic media, the print media, and Doonesbury, not necessarily in that order."—President Gerald FordSo loyal has been this following that on occasions when Doonesbury was suddenly notable for its absence from a paper following a satirical thrust that had somehow offended editors' notions of comic-strip propriety, readers have always managed to protest it back onto the page.The Doonesbury Chronicles marks the first hardcover appearance of Michael J. Doonesbury and cohorts, and is their first collection to include Sunday color pages. In all, 572 strips are presented, as selected by Garry Trudeau and encompassing the full Doonesbury canon, from its cozy campus origins at the frazzled end of the sixties through the stumbling first half of the seventies. Conducting us along the way is a motley though always redeemable cast that includes a student radical turned disc jockey, an immaculately dense but nonetheless charismatic quarterback, a nature freak who has nightmares about Mark Spitz, and a runaway housewife who ends up as a Berkeley law student by way of the Walden Commune Day-Care Center. For those hooked on Trudeau, as well as those still somehow deprived, for giving or hoarding, The Doonesbury Chronicles is a rich and Recession-proof treasure of a book.

The Monkey Wrench Gang


Edward Abbey - 1975
    On a rafting trip down the Colorado River, Hayduke joins forces with feminist saboteur Bonnie Abbzug, wilderness guide Seldom Seen Smith, and billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., and together they wander off to wage war on the big yellow machines, on dam builders and road builders and strip miners. As they do, his characters voice Abbey's concerns about wilderness preservation ("Hell of a place to lose a cow," Smith thinks to himself while roaming through the canyonlands of southern Utah. "Hell of a place to lose your heart. Hell of a place... to lose. Period").Moving from one improbable situation to the next, packing more adventure into the space of a few weeks than most real people do in a lifetime, the motley gang puts fear into the hearts of their enemies, laughing all the while. It's comic, yes, and required reading for anyone who has come to love the desert.

Cat


B. Kliban - 1975
    The book that gave new meaning to wacka-wacka and forever redefined it. Cat is the classic that started it all. It gave a voice to catmaniacs around the country and launched an entire genre in publishing and licensing. Everybody went crazy. “Neither cute nor mysterious but instead simply and irreverently, even raucously, very funny.”—Village Voice.

A Dance to the Music of Time, Complete Set: 1st Movement, 2nd Movement, 3rd Movement, 4th Movement


Anthony Powell - 1975
    Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses. Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widermerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. Considered a masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich panorama of life in England between the wars. Includes these novels: A Question of Upbringing A Buyer's Market The Acceptance World "Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. Hisadmirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune "A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times "One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

The Complete Compleat Enchanter


L. Sprague de Camp - 1975
    Omnibus including The Roaring Trumpet, The Mathematics of Magic, The Castle of Iron, The Wall of Serpents, and The Green Magician.The Baen edition includes an introduction by David Drake.

Southern Ladies and Gentlemen


Florence King - 1975
    Florence King's celebrated field guide to the land below the Mason-Dixon Line is now blissfully back in print, just in time for the Clinton era. The Failed Souther Lady's classic primer on Dixie manners captures such storied types as the Southern Woman (frigid, passionate, sweet, bitchy, and scatterbrained--all at the same time), the Self-Rejuvenating Virgin, and the Good Ole Boy in all his coats and stripes. (The Clinton questions--is he a G.O.B. or isn't he?--Miss king covers in her hilarious new Afterword.) No one has ever made more sharp, scathing, affectionate, real sense out of the land of the endless Civil War than Florence King in these razor-edged pages.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy


Robert Shea - 1975
    Joseph Malik, editor of a radical magazine, had snooped into rumors about an ancient secret society that was still alive and kicking. Now his offices have been bombed, he's missing, and the case has landed in the lap of a tough, cynical, streetwise New York detective. Saul Goodman knows he's stumbled onto something big—but even he can't guess how far into the pinnacles of power this conspiracy of evil has penetrated.Filled with sex and violence—in and out of time and space—the three books of The Illuminatus! Trilogy are only partly works of the imagination. They tackle all the cover-ups of our time—from who really shot the Kennedys to why there's a pyramid on a one-dollar bill—and suggest a mind-blowing truth.

The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual Of Survival And Manners


J.P. Donleavy - 1975
    It's most often found listed as nonfiction, however. A guide to social climbing and survival in the asphalt jungle as only Donleavy could write. Not for the easily offended and wonderfully about as non-politically correct as could be. Also rife with illustrations by the author. Humor, Literary Studies, Social Studies

American Fried


Calvin Trillin - 1975
    Trillin knows that the search for good food requires constant vigilance particularly when outside the Big Apple. Not that Cincinnati and Houston and Kansas City (his hometown) lack magnificent places to eat—if one can resist the importunities of those well-meaning ignoramuses who insist on hauling you off to La Maison de la Casa House, the pride of local epicures too dumb to realize that the noblest culinary creations of the American heartland are barbecued ribs, fried chicken, hash browns and hamburgers. Trillin is ready to do battle for K.C.'s Winstead's as the home of the greatest burger in the USA. Generally, he advises, you will do fine if you avoid ""any restaurant the executive secretary of the chamber of commerce is particularly proud of."" Also, any restaurant with (ply)wood paneling and ""atmosphere,"" where the food is likely to taste ""something like a medium-rare sponge."" This then is not a celebration of multi-star ""restaurants"" but of diners, roadhouses, eateries—the kind that serve food on wax paper or plastic plates and to hell with Craig Claiborne. With tongue in stuffed cheek Trillin gives the finger to the food snobs, confessing his secret vices with fiendish glee and high good humor.

I Wouldn't Have Missed It: Selected Poems


Ogden Nash - 1975
    It fills the needs for a single, up-to-date selection from all of Ogden Nash's previous collections, covering more than four decades of his unique observation of the human condition and his enormously satisfying poetic achievement.

Think Good Thoughts about a Pussycat


George Booth - 1975
    Publisher-Dodd, Mead & Company in 1975-Second printing.

Peanuts Jubilee: My Life and Art with Charlie Brown and Others


Charles M. Schulz - 1975
    Publisher: Penguin Date of Publication: 1977 Binding: soft back Edition: Condition: Good Description: 0140042814 some loose pages a tear on front cover

The Contests at Cowlick


Richard Kennedy - 1975
    

The Rape of the APE (American Puritan Ethic): The Official History of the Sexual Revolution


Allen Sherman - 1975
    

Crocodile, Crocodile


Peter Nickl - 1975
    In their talk, he hears mention of a crocodile store that sells marvelous things and he decides to find it. Down the river, across the sea, overland he travels to the beautiful city of Paris where his friendly overtures terrify people into unconsciousness or drive them up trees in fright. Through the deserted streets he searches until at last he finds it —but what a disappointment. The things sold in the crocodile store are not for crocodiles at all; they’re all made from crocodile skin. How Omar takes sweet revenge becomes a clever and funny ending. Ecology was never more charming.

The Weird World of Gahan Wilson


Gahan Wilson - 1975
    

Speak Softly, and Carry a Beagle


Charles M. Schulz - 1975
    Snoopy and members of the Peanuts gang continue to ponder the problems of growing up.

Thelwell Goes West


Norman Thelwell - 1975
    If you've ever yearned to gallop a golden palomino along the cowboy trails or dreamed of leaping into the saddle from an upper window of the Golden Nugget Saloon and quitting town in a hail of bullets, this is the book for you.Slipped under the Stetson it could mean survival if you should - by any chance - bounce your head at the rodeo. Stuffed up the shirtfront, it might even stop a bullet at twenty paces.

Backstage At The Strips


Mort Walker - 1975
    Besides just being a source of entertainment, they comment on our lives, they contain philosophy and political comment and often help children learn to read. They are a wonderful way to study history.”—Mort WalkerBackstage at the Strips is a compilation of Walker's obvious passion for this truly American art form and the business that runs it. He invites us in to show us the process and the history behind it. We also get to meet the funny people that draw the comics we dearly love to read, the fans that make them so popular and man that gives us this delightful glimpse.

The Cracked Cosmos of Gahan Wilson


Gahan Wilson - 1975
    

The Schinocephalic Waif


Alexander Theroux - 1975
    The tale is told by Alexander Theroux (author of Three Wogs) and Stan Washburn (author and illustrator of George's Dragon) and unleashes thirty illustrations.This chilling story will warm your heart.

No Laughing Matter: Rationale of the Dirty Joke - Second Series


Gershon Legman - 1975
    Legman was perhaps the foremost scholar of the dirty joke, and as legions of humor writers and comedians know, his Rationale of the Dirty Joke remains the most exhaustive and authoritative study of the subject. More than two thousand jokes and folktales are presented, covering such topics as The Female Fool, The Fortunate Fart, Mutual Mismatching, and The Sex Machine. These folk texts are authentically transcribed in their innocent and sometimes violent entirety. Legman studies each for its historical and socioanalytic significance, revealing what these jokes mean to the people who tell them and to the people who listen and laugh. Here is the definitive text for comedians and humor writers, Freudian scholars and late night television enthusiasts. Rationale of the Dirty Joke will amuse you, offend you, challenge you, and disgust you, all while demonstrating the intelligence and hilarity of the dirty joke.

God


Woody Allen - 1975
    A Greek actor and a writer are discussing how to end a play. Actors, including Doris Levine from Great Neck, Blanche DuBois, and Groucho Marx, pop out of the audience. Peppered with metaphysical and philosophical questions, the play skids along farcically until the actor and writer conclude that it lacks a beginning as well as an end.

Dennis the Menace Ol' Droopy Drawers


Hank Ketcham - 1975
    

The Animated Thumbtack Railroad Dollhouse & All Around Surprise Book, Evening Edition


Louis Phillips - 1975
    

Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded


Alan Dundes - 1975
    

Big Boss: Ready-to-Read Level 2


Anne Rockwell - 1975
    Three-color illustrations.

The Ungentlemanly Art: A History Of American Political Cartoons


Stephen Hess - 1975
    

Compleat Feghoot: The Lives and Times of History's Greatest Traveler


Reginald Bretnor - 1975
    

MAD's Don Martin Steps Further Out


Don Martin - 1975
    goes off the deep end and hits rock bottom again in this all-new collection of earth-shattering humor!So if you dig ground-breaking approaches and depth-defying insanity in your funny-fare, you can't help but fall for-Mad's Don Martin Steps Further Out!

Big Bird's Busy Book


Michael Frith - 1975
    things to make, things to do, games and stories, recipes too."Big Bird and his Muppet friends introduce a collection of stories, poems, puzzles, recipes, crafts, and games.

Round The Horne


Barry Took - 1975
    Written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman.First broadcast in 1966 and 1967, these two episodes include Daphne Whitethigh giving one of her special cookery tips, an appearance by Seamus Android and the Armpit Theatre presents 'Gaslight – Son of Flicker'.There’s a new version of Herman Melville’s classic novel, 'Moby Duck', Charles and Fiona (Hugh Paddick and Betty Marsden) pop up, Rambling Syd Rumpo (Kenneth Williams) delights us and Julian and Sandy (Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams) give us more outrageous innuendo.Vintage Beeb: classic albums first available as BBC LPs, now reissued. This recording was previously released on LP in 1976 and subsequently on 'Round the Horne' 'Volume 1' and 'The Very Best Episodes Volume 3'.