Who had "Whacking Off" in a Bennett Cerf book index on their bingo card? Show of hand?
It's a reference to Whacking Day on The Simpsons, right?
Right?
If Curt is compelled to do it, I am curious yet afraid about the context.
Oookay. I'll try to keep this SFW.
I don't have the Cerf book in front of me, but the key word here is "Roth." Philip Roth's novel
Portnoy's Complaint is a first-person novel that's basically a dialogue from the namesake protagonist to his psychoanalyst about his fantasies and how he's unable to enjoy them except... uh, by himself.
Published by Random House in 1969, Roth had originally written it as part of a sketch for the Broadway show
Oh Calcutta!, but eventually reworked it into the novel, although it took awhile. He sold a single chapter of it (under the name listed in the Cerf index) to
Partisan Review, a literary journal, the year before the novel came out.
There was a lot of interest in
Portnoy's Complaint, partly because of the subject matter (almost nobody was writing about that back then, and certainly very few mainstream publishers were putting it in print) and partly because Roth's first novella
Goodbye Columbus became a hit movie a few months later. (Richard Benjamin starred in the film versions of both books.) The most famous line I've heard about
Portnoy's Complaint came from Jacqueline Susann, who said on
The Tonight Show she'd like to meet Roth, but wouldn't want to shake his hand.
