Daddy’s Boy – Chris Elliott with Bob Elliott, 1989 ★★½

Man-Child Looks Back in Anger

What’s it like being the product of an overbearing celebrity parent? You know the type, pushing you into the public eye and molding you into their own image, to the point of dressing you in an ascot and shaving your head to match their own receding hairline.

This was the fate of one Chris Elliott, son of fabled entertainer Bob Elliott, as he relates in this no-holds-barred pity party of a memoir, subtitled “A Son’s Shocking Account Of Life With A Famous Father.”

Before the short memoir is completed, Chris has survived morbid obesity, a capsized ocean liner, a humiliating thumb-wresting match, and his father skipping his high school graduation to get his neck hair trimmed at the barber shop next door.

Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall – Spike Milligan, 1971 ★★½

Goon Goes to War

There’s nothing so tragic that laughter can’t be mined from it. Not even World War II.

Of course, a lot depends on who is doing the mining.

Back in the 1950s, Spike Milligan redefined comedy in Great Britain as a performer and lead writer on radio’s “The Goon Show.” Before all that, in 1940, Milligan took time out of his young life to help beat back the Nazi war machine, as a draftee in an artillery regiment.

All The Words, Vol. Two – Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1989 ★★★

Monty Python: The Spam Years

Genius is hard to capture, and hard to sustain. The impulse to keep doing what works often misleads; so too can the desire to change things up. If you do something that makes a large portion of your audience uncomfortable, the challenge can be that much greater, particularly if you are dependent on government sponsorship while honing your craft.

All this comes into play when reviewing this second, final volume of one of television comedy’s most legendary achievements, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” Vol. Two collects transcripts for the last 22 episodes of the famous series, those airing from December 1970 to December 1974.

All The Words, Vol. One – Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1989 ★★★★

Python... Before the Big Screen

Loving good old Monty Python comes easy, but it’s a sign of age when you hear what it is about Python people love. For many, debate centers around cinema. Arthur? Brian? Perhaps some wafer-thin love for Mr. Creosote?

MAD Strikes Back! – Harvey Kurtzman, 1955 ★★½

Taking a MAD Look Back

Last month came further evidence of the Apocalypse: MAD magazine rebooted itself. After a run of 550 issues begun in 1952, the humor staple officially rehauled itself with a new Issue #1. Readers of the latest ish were greeted by new staff, new logo, and new overall design.

The Best Humor Annual – Edited by Louis Untermeyer & Ralph E. Shikes, 1952 ★

Laffs on Not Quite Every Page

Read some old books, and you wonder what they ever did to deserve consignment to a quick obscurity. Other old books show Father Time tough but fair. Take this exhaustive but underwhelming compendium of humorous writings published in 1951-1952.

The Simpsons Uncensored Family Album – Matt Groening, 1991 ★★★½

The Way They Was

You can’t hurl a dead Snowball I across the internet without hitting an online debate around the question: When did the longest-running sitcom in American history jump the shark? Everyone knows “The Simpsons” today is no longer the show it was; when did the rot set in?

As a former bigtime Simpsons fan whose devotion fled sometime between the rise of Britney Spears and the fall of Enron, I feel I have company in my lack of clarity. Some cite specific episodes as their turn-off points; for me it is not that simple. Re-discovering the early Simpsons, in the form of this tie-in book published in the second year of their 28-years-and-counting run, brought that home.

Without Feathers – Woody Allen, 1975 ★★★½

Woody the Gag Man, Getting (Somewhat) Serious

Hard to believe, there was a time when Woody Allen could be enjoyed purely as a comic genius. Without Feathers presents him at the zenith of his comedy career, when he was becoming more overtly concerned with what it all meant but not so much that he stopped being playful.

Allen is all over the map in this 1975 collection, most of which first appeared in issues of The New Yorker, Playboy, and The New Republic earlier that decade.