Sunday, March 30, 2008

The Cokesbury Stunt Book

I found this book at a thrift store in Columbia, SC. Arthur Depew was a loyal member of the West Palm Beach Kiwanis club. This useful 1934 manual contains 600 stunts, japes, and hilarious suggestions for all of your service club meeting needs, whether you be Rotarian, Kiwanis, K. of C. or any other white male brotherhood:

My favorite part of the so-called "stunt" entitled "K. K. K." is the suggestion that robes be "secure[d]" from the Klan, as though the intended audience of the book generally won't be lacking such contacts.
There are a few more amazingly offensive pages in this book, but the rest are crashingly boring, miraculously unfunny party ideas that make me wonder why anyone ever joined a service club in the first place.

1 comment:

John Waggener said...

I like the idea of the backward program. It would probably just be annoying in practice, but the idea of doing things in reverse has its appeal.

The KKK thing is bizarre and funny. Particularly the assumption that one would simply borrow the costumes from the KKK...