Bestseller Revisited

RALLY ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS! (278 pp.) --Max Shulman--Doubleday ($3.50).

There are 100,000 known Shulmaniacs currently at large in the U.S. This cultish tribe spends easy ($3.50 per spindly copy of Rally Round the Flag, Boys!) and laughs easy--at soggy puns, campus wheezes, G.I. antics and leering badinage about the hot-and-cold war between the sexes. As a humorist, Max (Barefoot Boy with Cheek) Shulman is a kind of roadhouse Wodehouse, a breezy, rattlebrained funnyman whose books can and probably should be read with the TV set on.

At 38, Author Shulman looks rather like a hale Oscar Levant, but he writes like a much younger man, say, the undergraduate editor of the University of Minnesota's defunct humor mag Ski-U-Mah. In this book Ski-U-Mah's ex-editor decided to double his literary smileage by combining the thoroughly worked drolleries of army life with the equally well-publicized foibles of exurbia.

Author Shulman plants a Nike missile base in Putnam's Landing, Fairfield County, Conn, and fuses the inevitable melee between mufti and khaki. Among the participants in this guffawlderol: a club-car Pagliaccio otherwise known as "Harry Bannerman, boy adulterer" whose inability to make a heavy date with his civic-minded wife drives him to guilt-ridden sessions "of candlelight and yum-yum" with a sex-famished neighbor; the neighbor's absentee husband, a cigar-chomping titan of TV; an amiable, lovesick sheep in second lieutenant's clothing named Guido di Maggio ("Hey, di Maggio, let's play some ball"); di Mag's girl, a progressive schoolteacher who starts the whole town talking with her sex talks to second graders; a real-estate shyster who turns swampland into pay dirt by renaming it "Powderhorn Hill"; a toothsome teen-age tidbit named Comfort Goodpasture whose Puritan blood is brought to a boil by a guitar-strumming Army corporal from Altus, Okla.

Into each of these lives plummets a fulsome quota of barracks-room and smoking-car bawdry and a fairly steady drizzle of Shulman's arch patter ("Gloria hasn't been a bit well. She ran into this lobster pot when she was water skiing last summer"). Upon Putnam's Landing itself, in a slap-happy ending, falls a distinctly unguided missile. No such fate has befallen Rally Round, which zoomed with unerring prepublication dispatch to its logical target, Hollywood.

In a burst of klieg-lit euphoria, no less an authority than Producer and Play-tinker George Abbott once claimed that Author Shulman "seems distantly related to Dean Swift and Rabelais." This book proves that the feather merchant of U.S. humor is still keeping his distance.

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