A FUNNY THING HAPPENED TO ME ON THE WAY TO THE GRAVE

The author's autobiographical excuse in occasioned by a lady who finds Douglas's old drum in the attic of the nbrok home where he spent his childhood. And if you can accept the fact that Jack Douglas was ever a child, the rest of the mad meandering should be fairly easy to swallow. Mr. Finnegan, the husband of the drum-finder, writes an irate opistic to Douglas, inquiring ""What shall we do with your goddam drum?"", a question which is finally answered at the very end of the book: ""Mrs. Finnegan -- about the drum. Just put it back in the attic and while you're up there, please look around for my sister. I just remembered -- the day we moved to California, she was up in the attic looking for it"". Between Lynbrook and Jack Paar, he went to camp, ""played the drum and sang It's A Treat To Heat Your Feet In The Mississippi Mud with a trio, wrote a few flicks, and provided material for some of the country's top comedians. For one who missed the bent-selling My Brother Was An Only Child and Never Laugh At A Naked Bus Driver, its difficult to describe Douglas's kind of rye(sic:) humor. He writes kind of out of the side of his mouth -- show-biz stuff mostly -- like a nihilistic Joe E. Lewis. He's necessarily undisciplined, very sick, and funniest when he's filthy. This one should go as well as his others.