Very funny, especially the costume ball chapter. You can sort of see where I Love Lucy came from, although with a more suburban, country club feel. ( )

I was perusing Neglected Books's "Reader Recommendations" to wile away a leaden hour of restless twitching as the nasty shingles stabbed my nerve endings for their amusement and ran across this ancient humorous collection of sexist nonsense from 1941. It was the source material for I Love Lucy among other things; Mama had a hardcover of it that I, for some reason (forgot to go to the library? summertime lull? don't remember), picked up and finished in a Watergate-hearings-deadened 1973 afternoon.

The Mahfouzes (see >123 above) were all piled atop something, and seeing this title caused the bulb to flash: This book is a rare survivor of the various losses my library has seen over the years! Why in the heck these various and random weirdos survived I do not know. At some point I evdently flung a few things in a box that never got reopened until I landed in New York, but whatever.

So I flipped through this time capsule of gender politics and came away no more and no less amused than I was fiftyish years ago. It's amusing. The setting isn't I Love Lucy's Upper East Side, it's some midwestern place; the Cugats have a comedy-accent foreign maid with the usual "naive peasant" beliefs; Mr. Cugat isn't as funny as Ricky was, though he has a larger cast of sidekicks ("tell {your drunken friend} he can go have his DTs all over someone else's house!" says Mrs. C in a true cringe moment); it's a period piece and is well-enough written that I didn't want to hurl, it or my lunch, at a wall.

I do have an issue, the same one that makes me dislike rewatching the sitcom, with Mrs. Cugat's tendency to lie her way into trouble. Mr. Cugat calls it "whiffling" instead of lying, which is what it is, and does (like Ricky) flip-flop between covering madly and shouting at...well, chastising...Mrs. Cugat for it. If I were reading it for the first time today, I'd give it two stars and a ripping good flensing. But it was funny as hell once, it spawned a movie, a radio show, and two TV shows, all of which I've partaken of (Old Time Radio! gotta love them guys), so it's sorta (great-)grandfathered in.

Don't sprain anything finding and reading it, though. Best appreciated from a safe distance. ( )