Fallen Arch

SLEEP TILL NOON (191 pp.) -- Max Shulman--Doubleday ($2).

When Max Shulman was editor of Ski-U-Mah, then the humor magazine of the University of Minnesota, he was one of a group of aspiring authors who showed their pieces to Novelist Sinclair Lewis, and asked the great man's advice. Lewis' advice: first go to work in a grocery store. Max had already worked in a grocery store; he sat down and wrote a book.

Barefoot Boy with Cheek was a remarkably sustained example of the kind of homely slapstick that gets a big laugh in the freshman dormitories. It sold 33.000 copies (and 220,000 reprints), and made Max, at 24, a very big yuk in the laugh trade. The Feather Merchants (1944) and The Zebra Derby (1946) did even better. On the dust jacket of Max's fourth book, Sleep Till Noon, no less an authority than Playwright George Abbott has no hesitation about calling Max a humorist "who seems distantly related to Dean Swift and Rabelais."

Sleep Till Noon should maintain his high sales, as well as his distance from Swift and Rabelais. Advertised as "a roaring burlesque of middle-class morality," it is actually an aimless gaggle of giggles about a bus boy who married money. At the end, with a penetration more like Jack Homer's than Dean Swift's, Max sticks in his thumb and pulls out a withered old prune for his readers' delectation. Money, he warns archly, corrupts.

To get this bit of wisdom, the reader has to swallow the whole Shulman shovelful of old wheezes, soggy puns, strained parodies and cheap leers at the female form, a mixture that might be the waste from S. J. Perelman's basket. Sample: "I was going down to Florida anyhow," hums the rich girl. "There's some alligators down there making a bag for me."

Here & there Shulman throws in a few new twists. Too often, however, the jokes just lie there; and the arch, in humor as in feet, can be terribly painful when it falls flat.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.