Hearty breakfast of punch

Press, 16 February 1980, Page 17

Hearty breakfast of punch

Pick of Punch. Edited by Alan Coren. Hutchinson, 1979. 192 pp. $16.95. (Reviewed by A. K. Grant)

“Punch” is undergoing one of its more brilliant phases. Its previous editor, William Davis, an economic journalist, was inclined to fill it full of pieces by famous entertainers whose only qualification as comic writers was that they were famous entertainers. He also filled it full of pieces by famous businessmen, on much the same principle. The editor before him (I think I am right in saying) was Bernard Hollowood, a fairly mediocre cartoonist, but obviously a very nice man, who produced a very nice magazine. Coren is a very different kettle of fish from either of his predecessors, (assuming for the purpose of this rather mixed metaphor that a singular entity like a journalist can be, in metophroical terms, a collective entity like a kettle of fish). Coren is, with the possible exception of Woody Allen, who has not achieved anything like the volume of Coren’s oeuvre, sustainedly the most brilliant writer of comic pieces in English. Thus he is an editor who puts his talent where his

blue pencil is, and his writers seem to respond accordingly. And not only his writers. Coren has been the lucky legatee of a stable of cartoonists — Mahood, Handelsman, Ffolkes, Bill Tidy, Honeysett, Hector Breeze — a stable assembled under his predecessors, but all performing at the top of their bent for him. Hector Breeze’s cartoon of the official in the Prison Administration Department saying to a clerkly inferior, “I hope the death penalty doesn’t come back. Have you any idea what a hearty breakfast costs these days,” is not necessarily better than others in this collection, but is indicative of the intention of Coren, his cartoonists and writers, to give you a nasty turn where appropriate. Not everything in the 1979 “Pick of Punch” is as brilliant as everything else. But there is a very considerable amount of very good stuff. And the price of $16.95 is particularly reasonable. These days you are lucky if for $16.95 you can get an illustrated paperback on Great Refrigerated Vehicles of the Second World War. “Pick of Punch” is much better value than that.