Try and Stop Me was published by Simon & Schuster in 1944 — a significant bibliographic fact, since Cerf was the president of Random House. The arrangement was amicable: Simon & Schuster had expertise in marketing humor books (they had published the first crossword puzzle book in 1924, launching a franchise), and Cerf felt it would be unseemly to publish his own joke collection through his own firm. The book sold enormously — over half a million copies — and spawned a series of sequels that kept Cerf on bestseller lists for the next twenty years.
The book is organized loosely by subject (Broadway, Hollywood, the literary world, sports, politics) and draws on Cerf’s vast acquaintance. The anecdotes feature everyone from George S. Kaufman to Groucho Marx to Alexander Woollcott, and many of them have passed into the common stock of American humor. Cerf’s telling is precise and economical — he understood that a joke, like a short story, depends on selection and timing, and he never used three words where two would serve.
The comedy is period-specific: urbane, New York-centered, literary in its references, and innocent by contemporary standards. There is nothing mean-spirited in the book — Cerf’s humor was inclusive rather than satirical, designed to make people laugh rather than to wound. This quality, which made him enormously popular in his lifetime, has worked against his posthumous reputation: the literary establishment has always preferred the darker humor of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and their successors to Cerf’s civilized amiability.
But Try and Stop Me preserves something valuable: the world of mid-century American wit, when a publisher, a playwright, and a comedian could sit at the same table and understand each other’s references. Cerf’s New York was a place where literature and entertainment overlapped, where publishers were public figures, and where a good story was a form of social currency. The book is a time capsule of that world.
Collecting Try and Stop Me
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1944): Illustrated by Carl Rose. Blue cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Book club editions: $3–$8
- Later reprints: $3–$8
The wartime first edition was printed on relatively poor paper. Fine copies with intact jackets are less common than the book’s huge sales would suggest.