Chicago Spanking Review Special Presentation

Humorama Spanking Mentions

From Breezy, June 1959. Click to double-size.

We mentioned while discussing the Humorama spanking verses that we couldn't tell from them alone whether Abe Goodman was an actual spanko or merely an editor who liked spanking material. But Humorama also sometimes published short-shorts - really just single incidents rather than short stories - that are somewhat reminiscent of the little two-pagers that used to appear in comic books. Some of these had spankings, and the tone we find in them makes it more likely that Goodman was indeed one of us. We're going to see a couple of these now, followed by some cartoons in which a spanking is mentioned but does not actually take place.

In the first, the spanking isn't described in great detail, but on the other hand the spankee does request another OTK session in the future, proof positive that Goodman liked the whole idea of spankings.

The tone of second example, from the July 1960 issue of Jest, makes Goodman look more like a true spanko. An "ornate paddle" is used on a beautiful stenographer's bare bottom - details which a non-spanko would be unlikely to include, or even think of. Some of the description is a little oblique: "He alpined her skirt so that the instrument of correction might arrive at an unimpeded conjunction with its destination". This is a roundabout way of saying the spanker wanted to lay the paddle across the spankee's bare behind, but the style does not obscure the loving way this detail is presented, nor the the "spasmodic wriggles" that result from the impact of the second swat.

Then there's the fact the spankee deliberately brought about her own "disciplinary" spanking - these two are obviously both into it, and so probably is any author who chooses to write about such characters.

From Jest, July 1960. Click to double-size.

"He brought the paddle down on the target area. She twisted violently. Again he brought it down, in an agitation of the area that rippled into spasmodic wriggles."

The accompanying suggestion, "Bad Girl Needs Good Spanking!" to this playful pose of model Lorris Bradley taking down her own panties suggests that spanking came readily to the mind of Humorama editor Abe Goodman. (Click to double-size.)

O.K., if you were the editor and you had to devise a caption for a photograph of a pretty girl coyly taking down her own panties with a big smile on her face, could you resist coming up with something that involved a spanking? We couldn't, either! Nor, it seems, could Abe Goodman, who wrote, "I guess those psychology analyses haven't accomplished anything; you'll have to resort to an old-fashioned spanking!"

Goodman liked this one well enough that he put it on the back cover (left) as well as inside (below) the February 1966 issue of Stare.

From Stare, February 1966 (Web-Ed's collection. Click to double-size.)

From Breezy, December 1954 (Web-Ed's collection. Click to double-size.)

Here's a second spanking mention that's given back-cover play, this time featuring the inimitable Bettie Page! Bettie and spanking go together like bacon and eggs, so she was a good choice on Goodman's part. The caption says,

"It may not do any good to spank a girl after she's sixteen," remarks Betty Page, "but it is a heap of fun!"

Finally, we have a series of cartoons in which spanking is mentioned. The first of these is by Bill Ward, and features a young lady who informs us, "I must be home by ten, or I'll be getting a spanking I won't like!" As opposed to a spanking she would like, is the first thing that occurs to us. The implication is clear that she doesn't mind being spanked at least sometimes, although the rest of the cartoon is a muddle - why is she telling this to a middle-aged guy, and why is she standing on a path through the woods with him?

From Mike's collection, taken from an unknown Humorama digest in the 60's. It had probably appeared earlier, however. (Click to double-size.)

The question immediately arises as to whether these cartoons may have appeared before the actual "spankers" became common, perhaps as trial balloons to see whether a spanking-themed cartoon was acceptable. With the Ward cartoon above and most of the others we can't be sure, but this one from Kirk Stiles was first printed in the September 1959 issue of Jest at a time when full-blown spanking cartoons must have already been appearing every month. Evidently the readers (and Goodman) couldn't get enough spanking!

Stiles' visual focus, as it often was, is on the upper half of the female body - he several times suggests that a bra or bikini top is about to fall off, as we see here with an ahead-of-its-time wonder bra. Stiles' caption, known from the original art (right-most image) reads, "I'll take a little walk, get insulted, slap somebody's face and end up getting a royal good spanking!" Obviously the young lady is not averse to getting a spanking, at least if it's given by one of the good-looking young guys seen down the beach in the distance.

Click to double-size.

Probably the most durable of all the spanking-themed cartoons were those featuring secretaries getting the OTK treatment. They provided plenty of gag material and a ready supply of pretty girls in a recognizable setting. From the man who invented the form, Bill Wenzel, we have this cartoon in which a secretary isn't actually spanked but makes it clear to her boss that it's absolutely o.k. with her if she is: "You can spank me anytime I make a mistake, boss!" And she's quite spankable, too - Wenzel not only gave her a well-rounded bottom, her posture and expression are completely submissive! For that reason, this cartoon is probably the most erotic one of the group seen here.

We found this one in the April 1970 issue of Laugh Digest, but it had certainly appeared earlier. We'd guess from the style it dates from the late 50's. (Click to double-size.)

[06/07/2013 Update: We later confirmed that this cartoon's first appearance was in the April, 1957 issue of Joker.]

From Breezy (December 1954, Web-Ed's collection. Click to double-size.)

We've written often of the Humorama "Big Five" spanking artists - Bill Ward, Bill Wenzel, Kirk Stiles, Dan DeCarlo, and Homer Provence - but there was another Humorama artist who was more than a match for any of them, and it is a great pity that he didn't do any true "spankers" for a reason we'll explain in a moment - Jack Cole. Cole had worked in comics for years, in fact even doing a couple of spanking scenes in Plastic Man (a character he created, by the way, and one of the all-time great super-heroes - the M/F one may be seen in Police Comics #73). As the comics industry waned in the 1950's, Cole branched out into strips with Betsy and Me and, in a completely different style, cartoons for Humorama (which he signed "JAKE") and Playboy.

Now, Hugh Hefner at Playboy paid a much higher rate than Abe Goodman did at Humorama, and we therefore believe that Cole's work for Humorama took place before he became established at Playboy in 1954 - one year before Wenzel did the first "spanker". The timing is critical because if our theory is correct, it means that Cole left Humorama just before the "spanker" became fashionable, which explains why he never did one. He did, however, do a couple of cartoons in which spanking is mentioned or implied.

In the first of these, seen at left, a woman sitting near a band onstage remarks that the part she "liked best was the trombone solo!" The joke here is that the trombone's slide would be poking her in the behind every time it was extended, and it's a funny one even if this constitutes a very strange form of "spanking". Her escort's expression seems to say, "How am I supposed to deal with this?"

More widely-seen is this one in which a man, apparently not getting anywhere with a pretty young thing, informs her that if she won't have him, he'll "marry your mother, become your father, and send you to bed every night at nine with a spanking!" Non-disciplinary erotic spanking is clearly implied here, even though on the surface he appears to be talking about the paternal variety. She doesn't seem especially receptive to this suggestion, but there's an air of haughtiness about her that suggests to us she genuinely deserves to be taken OTK.

We extracted this one from the July 1961 issue of Romp, but it had certainly first appeared years earlier since Cole was dead by then. (Click to double-size.)

All of this suggests that the subject of erotic spanking was becoming less taboo in a period that probably began in the late 1940's and then accelerated during the 50's when more adventurous magazines like Playboy were featuring first bare bosoms (1953) and then behinds (c. 1957). There were some mentions of spanking before this, for example Robert Harrison's Beauty Parade in 1948 (see Frontier Romances #1 for a short discussion) and even earlier in Hot Stories, the erotic aspects seem rather carefully muted. A thorough inquiry into exactly when erotic spanking could be hinted at more or less openly would require more materials from the 1930's and 40's than we have available to us at the present time.