One of the bizarre and indescribable books of cartoons by B. Kliban. This one was published in 1977 and, unlike his best known one Cat, has no discernible common thread or style. Well, naked bodies, perhaps. And puns. And a Turk.

Let me just list the titles of a few of my favourites, where the visual joke is more easily elucidated without seeing it.

  • Chewing Guam - Yep, big guy coming out of the sea and he's chewing Guam.
  • Sex Ed "Gloria has a visible organism" - mm, something like a great big paramecium on top of this very happy naked woman.
  • Jewish humor -- Orthodox Jew rolls home drunk, his wife's waiting up for him with not a rolling pin but the scrolls of the Torah.
  • Wasted & useful lives -- One man doing no work (relaxing on a desert island), the other doing a lot of work (with a pen in an office in a suit with a clock on the wall)
  • Deeper Meanings #36 -- People struggling to pull and push a cart that's on square wheels. The cart is full of round wheels.
  • Grouse Pincing on the Moor -- What it says: Scotsmen running around pincing grouse.
  • NEVER give a gun to ducks
  • Know Your Bod number 429 -- contrasting pictures of mammaries and daddaries.
  • "God made Monroe Simmons wear a lime popsicle around his neck for most of his adult life." -- Monroe looks really downcast at this; two passing beautiful women look sneeringly at him. The thing is, they've got tails.
  • The Turk -- a series of 22 darker, more detailed pages chronicling scenes that pass in the days of this fez-wearing Turk: cheap hotel rooms, trollops, bazaars, beaches, penguins, dreams, pursuits and discoveries... A novel with no continuity.
  • Gondolier attacked by rabbis
  • Chapter XXV "Bunny's prayer is rudely interrupted" - She's voluptuous, naked, praying by her bedside, and a ghostly cow's head has materialized by the door.
  • "Ted, a handsome person, had little trouble with the pencils"
  • Brethren and Cistern - three Amish-like brethren with barn, pitchfork, and a cistern.
  • End -- the editor tells the cartoonist he ought to be ashamed of himself.

I don't tire of leafing through Whack Your Porcupine. Oh, and... the secret of the title is depicted. If you whack it, it sings sweetly.

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