An admixture of good buffoonery, high audacity, bad temper and bad taste appeared on newsstands this week in the form of Editor Norman Anthony's Ballyhoo, ballyhooed as the funny magazine devoid of advertising (TIME, May n). Much of the content was devoted to burlesques of familiar advertising campaigns. Therein lay most of its humor, most of its audacity, some of its bad taste. Examples:
1) A picture of an infant's bare backside, with the text: KEEP KISSABLE
. . WITH OLD COLDS. "Open up a pack of Old Colds. . . . Smell the to- bacco. . . . You can't because there isn't any tobacco in it. . . ."
2) A picture of an ungainly witch swaddled in an 1890 bathing suit, an arrow pointing to the knee. Legends: Consider your Knee Cap!!! Don't Rasp Your Wife's Throat With Harsh Irritants. "Reach for a Hatchet Instead" . . . Ducky Wucky Cigarettes. "They're Hash Browned," Purified by Hot Air and Advertising Rays.
Because he believed it would impress the reader, Publisher George T. Delacort Jr. had printed on Ballyhoo's cover: "Edited by Norman Anthony, former editor of Life and Judge." Thus did Editor Anthony trade upon the very reputation he was bitterly attacking. He was discharged by Life, is suing for alleged breach of contract.
The Anthony temper was most bitterly expressed in a page headed "We Nominate for Oblivion—," an imitation of the feature created some months ago by Vanity Fair. Nominated for oblivion by Ballyhoo are Vanity Fair because its Oblivion department is "unsportsman-like"; Life, because "it cannot make up its mind whether to imitate Judge or the New Yorker."
More original than the burlesque of advertisements (which is by now a well-worn trick known to every undergraduate funny magazine in the U. S.) was Editor Anthony's policy on "text." Wrote he: "Magazines always have nice pretty text running around their pictures because it looks nice, and because the advertisers insist upon plenty of nice pretty text, but nobody reads the nice pretty text anyway. . . ."
Ballyhoo's page of "editorials" is composed entirely of the repeated word "Blah," written thus line after line: "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Throughout the book only one joke appears, over and over again: "Who was that lady I seen you with last night?" "That was no lady. That was my wife."