PARDON ME , SIR, BUT IS MY EYE HURTING YOUR ELBOW? and Mort Drucker and Jack Gilford and ...

This is what comes of cleaning the bookshelves. I ran across this 1968 book, a fumetti-style oddity, with actor Jack Gilford, in photo cut-out form, walking through Mort Drucker drawings, when I was cleaning yesterday. It was published by Thirteen Productions, is "An Original Motion Picture Comedy" presented by Bob Booker and George Foster. They add:

"PARDON ME, SIR, BUT IS MY EYE HURTING YOUR ELBOW?" is an original motion picture script. It will be shot as a feature length film and will be distributed in major theaters throughout the world.

"PARDON ME, SIR, ..." in essence, is a comic examination of the hypocrisies, dishonesties, and ironies of America life as seen though the eyes of twelve of America's greatest young writers. "

Booker and Foster were the writing team behind the comedy record The First Family, and its follow up. The First Family was one of the best selling comedy records of the 1960s.

Here are just a couple of pages from PARDON ME. As far as I can tell, no movie was ever made.

You would get a couple of pages like this in between comedy scripts by some of the above-named writers -- many of whom went on to fame and/or fortune. I love those little details: the street lamp in the first panel, all the different shapes of the signs, that pointy wrought iron fence.

What's interesting about this is that it's Mort Drucker, drawing his heart out -- with very few caricatures at all, anywhere. You can really see his attention to detail.

I'm guessing that this may have been originally developed as a series of comedy skits -- maybe for television -- that were cobbled together in this form. Each writer wrote a short script, complete with dialogue, camera directions.

This book can be found for a few bucks at a lot of places, including Amazon. A must for a Drucker fan.

Anyone remember Gilford's "pea soup coming to a boil" routine? He was a funny and charming actor. I wish he had done it in the movie Cocoon, then we would all know it. I think he did it on The Cosby Show

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