| Chapter 4: | Sicilian Folklore and American Comics |
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town of Red Mill and put ringleader Carmody and his henchmen behind bars. The Lone Ranger never used his weapons to kill his opponents, only to disarm them.
I liked Disney’s “Three Caballeros.” I saw it twice with Louie at the Rex. For a radio amateur contest I wrote a comedy skit on this movie only my three caballeros were Jimmy Durante, Lou Costello and Bob Hope. I got two of my junior high school friends to play Costello and Hope while I did an impersonation of Durante. I was told to take the script to the director’s apartment on Seventy-second Street. I rang her bell and she appeared in a negligee that left nothing to the imagination. She took the script and thanked me and closed her door. I reached the conclusion that writing about cartoon characters and comedians might not be such a bad idea and for some time after seeing all the director owned I thought I might make a career of it.
I bought myself a joke book titled The Good Humor Book, edited by Robert Rango and published by Harvest House in 1944. It claimed to be “A treasury of choice jokes and gags, cartoons and comic drawings, puns and patter, limericks and ditties, anecdotes, riddles and repartee, and many other types of humorous prose and verse.” The first joke in the book:
Customer: “To what do you owe your extraordinary success as a house-to-house salesman?” Salesman: “To the first five words I speak when a woman opens the door. I always ask: ‘Miss, is your mother in?’”
I convinced my grandparents to buy me a typewriter and asked my classmate, Maxie Rabinowitz, who liked to call himself “The