Toynbee Doob's Pal

TELEVISION Toynbee Doob's Pal

The book has 96 pages and 47 chapters, but more than half the space is blank. Chapter 47 is titled "Lord Chesterfield's Last Letter to His Son," and consists entirely of this message: "Dear Junior--Get lost--Dad." But as book stores closed last week, 42,500 copies had been sold, and Jack Douglas' My Brother Was an Only Child (Dutton; $2.50) made the bestseller lists for the ninth straight week.

Author Douglas--who originally had the book privately printed and sent to some 400 friends--is a weathered Janizary in the gag profession, whose sultans have been Bob Hope, Red Skelton, George Gobel, Jimmy Durante and, for the past twelve years, Jack Paar. Although Paar has announced that Douglas will be dropped when his contract runs out this month ("You have misused me and your expense account"), Jack has plugged the book, which was also aided by the flack magic of Manhattan Pressagent David Green. Result: last week a lot of people were being tickled by such blunt, Douglas-made instruments as a "sleeping-pill-of-the-month club," John Huston smoking a lizard, a law that "forbids the transportation of trained female seals over the state line for immoral porpoises."

Sick? The Douglas humor more often than not is of the "sick" variety--or, as a colleague put it, "his jokes need Blue Cross." One chapter is called "India, or Put the Cobra Back in the Basket, Mother --There'll Be No Show Tonight." Another begins: "Early this morning, somewhere in between my orange juice and my No. 1 concubine, I got to thinking about Toynbee Doob . . . He had an extra pinkie on each hand. When Toynbee drank tea he was the politest bastard in the county."

The book also contains a playlet "by Tennessee Gleckle," which "takes place entirely in the womb of an unborn lamb."

Well Adjusted? The man who turns out such iridescent pap has also given the Paar show many of its permanent gags, including the bit in which balls of various size talk to each other (a pingpong ball will say to a golf ball: "Mabel, you've really got to give up sweets"). A lanky (5 ft. 11 1/2 in., 170 Ibs.) man with a face like a TV portrait of Dorian Gray, Douglas privately fights a hopeless battle against his reputation as a way-out zany, claims he is just an ordinary, well-adjusted gag writer. He admits having surrounded his former Hollywood home with a steel Cyclone fence and forbidding signs saying "Northridge Lion Farm," but he denies shooting at low-flying aircraft. He also admits the story about how he loaded up his swimming pool with lumber, but only, he explains with Douglassy logic, to help the rabbits and gophers that might fall in.

Twice divorced (most recently from Singer Marion Hutton), Humorist Douglas, 50, who opens this week as one-man funnyman in a nightclub act, has a ready answer to questions about who his next wife will be. "Princess Margaret, of course," cracks Douglas, but his previous choices are on his mind too. He has netted more than $10,000 in the two months since his book was published and moans: "I can see the ex-wives closing in now." Says Jack Paar: "I think it would be fair to say that Mr. Douglas does all his writing under the influence of money."

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