If you are a first wave monster kid you might remember the so-called "elephant jokes" that were pretty popular in grade school for a time. In 1960, L.M Becker Co. of Appleton, Wisconsin jumped on the fad and issued a set of "Elephant Jokes" cards.
As you can see by the sample, there wasn't much to them, A simple, crude drawing and the answer to the joke on the card back, most of which was taken up by the company's offer to pay a buck for any jokes they accepted. I remember buying just a few packs of these and giving up; even as a youngster I could tell between quality and crap and these were definitely crap. Besides, I'd heard most of the jokes already in school! I would stick with baseball and monster cards, thank you. Even the jokes on monster cards weren't really all that humorous, but at least you got a nice photo on the front.
Bad jokes didn't stop many a marketeer from publishing various kinds of monster humor across the media landscape, from trading cards to magazines and even books. Here at WoM you've seen many photo-captioned and fumetti-style monster puns, which has been an on-again-off again popular format for years. For example, THE BRAVE GHOULS was a 1960 hardbound book of monster photos with the joke as a caption at the bottom, à la many a' monster card. Author and humorist Shel Silverstein used numerous monster movie stills for his TEEVEE JEEBIES features in PLAYBOY (when it was really good in the 50's-70's) using the word balloon, fumetti style.
Almost two decades after THE BRAVE GHOULS was sold through Captain Company out of the back pages of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, another monster joke book using the fumetti style was unleashed upon school kids by non other than Scholastic Book Services!
BEHIND THE APE BALL was an all-ape joke book written by humorist (and I use that term guardedly) Phil Hirsch and published in 1978. Hirsch wrote and edited a boat load of (tepid) joke books, mostly in the 60's and 70's such as 101 DRAGON AND KNIGHT JOKES, GHOSTS, MONSTERS & WITCHES ("Jokes to Put You to Creep!"), CAN YOU TOPLESS THIS? and GHOUL DAYS. He also worked for CRACKED and SICK magazines.
Here's the first swing on the vine through BEHIND THE APE BALL.
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