Looking back on his work in mid-career, Max Shulman saw that humor had from the first been his defense against the harshness of social reality. "I know now," he wrote in 1961, "why I turned early to humor as my branch of writing. The reason is simply that life was bitter and I was not. All around me was poverty and sordidness but I refused to see it that way. By turning it into jokes, I made it bearable." However ingenuous this deflection may appear as a protective device, it accurately indicates the limits of Shulman's humor, which typically transforms potentially disturbing social material into escapist entertainment. His satires either stop comfortably short of serious criticism or bypass social reality altogether for the still greater safety of farce. Unpleasant social conditions are acknowledged only to be dismissed: an indistinct slum in Sleep Till Noon (1950), for example, is merely the...