Whoops, Dearie!

PETER ARNO'S HULLABALOO--Peter Arno--Liveright ($3).* Imaginary characters are harder to create, oftener still-born than their flesh-&-blood brothers. In a lifetime of creative endeavor, few artists or writers succeed in making one character come alive for longer than it takes to read the book, see the picture. Artist Arno's pictured people are at the opposite pole from immortality, but at least two of them have already had a life of their own: the late famed Whoops Sisters, who appeared four years ago in Manhattan's New Yorker. These two disreputable old harridans, whooping with unseemly mirth at rowdy subtleties, made Artist Arno's reputation. Says Funnyman Robert Charles Benchley, introducing this latest book of Arno drawings: "When they [the Whoops Sisters] bounded, with their muffs and horrid hats, from the pages of the New Yorker, 50 years of picturized joking in this country toppled over with a crash." Now Peter Arno is a New Yorker mainstay, Manhattan's caricaturist-of-the-hour; his unique but not inimitable style is beginning to be copied. Benchley, a serious fellow-humorist, points out that Arno and the New Yorker between them have popularized the one-line joke (e. g.--a man driving a car pulls up beside a huge truck half on its side in a ditch, inquires politely: ''Tip over?"). ''Peter Arno may not have been the first to make use of the overheard remark as a basis for a drawing, but he has made himself the High Priest of the school by now. ... To see one of Peter Arno's illustrations of a one-line observation made by a dowager in a theater lobby or a young man in a porch hammock is to realize that, so long as people go on saying incongruous or pompous things, this young man will never lack for oysters, for the world is his." The Arno type of humorous drawing is hard to define, easy to recognize. The pictures that make you laugh are ludicrous, often slightly mad but always obvious; the pictures that make you snicker are allusive, satirical, not always to be taken in at a glance, usually are capable of at least a double meaning. About half these pictures should make you laugh ; you may snicker at the rest. Whichever you do, you will admit that Peter Arno knows his stuff and knows how to draw it. The Author. Peter Arno (real name : Curtis Arnoux Peters) is a strapping big 29-year-old Manhattanite. After a year at Yale college, he went to Yale's School of the Fine Arts for a month, and considers the month wasted. Onetime jazz leader for Gilda Gray, he could play the mandolin, the piano in the band. His wife is Lois Long, reporter ("Lipstick") for the New Yorker. They have one daughter (2 years old) who has been vaccinated on her heel so that no one will ever know. Peter Arno's Hullabaloo is Artist Arno's third book of drawings. The others : Whoops, Dearie! ; Peter Arno's Parade.

* Published Nov. 28.

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