Chicago Spanking Review Special Series

Humorama Model Spankings

Model Spanking #2 - Spanking Stick

Because we haven't seen all the early Humorama digests, we don't know if there were any other spanking photos around the time of the first (1951), which we saw last time. On the other hand, we have gone through enough issues from 1953-59 to know that they were not regular features, with the presumed second such photo not appearing until seven years after the first, in 1959. Why was that? Well for one thing, we know that Humorama wasn't commissioning its own photos but rather was purchasing publication rights from at least one outside vendor, Graphic House. (See Ann Bessart Part 2 over on the Bulletin Board). They could possibly have secured some spanking material from Irving Klaw or Robert Harrison, but Klaw was in the mail-order business and Harrison was a rival publisher, so neither was set up for that purpose and might in any case have wanted their product to remain exclusive. Another issue was that Klaw's stuff was mainly bondage-oriented while Harrison's was just plain goofy, and neither man specialized in spankings.

As we view this photo from the April 1959 issue of Gaze, another possibility that suggests itself is that Goodman was concerned with running afoul of state obscenity laws. (Read the story of how New York authorities cracked down on "obscene" spanking and bondage material in Nights of Horror #9 and the posts immediately following). Claiming that you were simply illustrating the "spanking stick" law might have been a tenable legal defense against an obscenity charge.

The third and probably last printing, in the February 1972 issue of Joker (click to increase in size). Posted by the Web-Ed on 09/23/2022.

What about the photo's merits as spanking erotica? It's pretty ho-hum, although better than the previous example because at least here we have some mediocre OTK positioning and a pretty spankee. By the time of its third printing in 1972, Humorama had already moved on to nude models being spanked as we'll see next time.

10/07/2022 Addendum: while going through our photo files, we discovered a picture of these same models in what must have been part of the same photographic sequence, original source unknown. It never appeared in Humorama, and we have no details as to where it did appear, although from the lettering we'd say it was a non-Humorama magazine. We have a better view of the spankee's girdle, and she has a nice grimace on her face, but of course the picture is somewhat marred by the common error of having a right-handed spanker use that hand rather than the left even though the spankee is going over his lap from left to right.