Joe Bennett: Plenty of out-dated reading to digest in this offering

Tuesday, 28 March 2023

Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor to Stuff.

OPINION: I've been sent the NZ edition of Reader's Digest for September 1974. It came with a note from Jan. I emailed the only Jan I know to acknowledge receipt, but she denied responsibility. So to Jan the Unknown, thank you.

If I'd ever launched a magazine I wouldn't have called it Reader's Digest. It's just too intestinal. But DeWitt Wallace thought otherwise in 1922, and he was proved right. He died in 1981 a multimillionaire.

At its peak Reader's Digest sold 60 million copies a month. And until this week I had never read one. I had seen them, torn, in dental waiting rooms, and I had seen them, ranked, on op shop shelves, but I had looked away, sneering. For I held the view, acquired I don't know how, that Reader's Digest was corny, simplistic and shallow.

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There's a global zeitgeist. In 1974 I was a sixth-former on the other side of the world. I had long hair. My friends had long hair. And on page 186 so do the three young men in the advertisement for Arnold Palmer Crimplene Shirts by Lichfield of New Zealand.

Moreover so do the two young men in the Bacardi ad who are wearing very short shorts. ‘’Anything goes with Bacardi,’’ runs the tag line and today one can't help seeing a certain gay suggestiveness. Back then, I suspect not.

Few things capture an age more precisely than advertisements. 1974 was the dawn of mass air travel. Air New Zealand was urging Kiwis to see ‘’the Orient’’, by which it meant the Far East, by which it meant a variety of countries lying west of New Zealand. ‘’It's so close, yet so different to anything you've ever experienced.’’

In contrast is a section called Laughter: the Best Medicine.

Joe Bennett: “If I'd ever launched a magazine I wouldn't have called it Reader's Digest. It's just too intestinal.”

‘’A young couple and their 15-month-old son were dining in a Chinese restaurant. The baby was in a good mood and babbling away in his own language.’’

I interrupt at this point to ask if you have guessed the comic pay-off. Oh well done.

‘’And the proud parents thought it was very clever of him – until the waiter showed up with two more orders of Egg Foo Yong.’’

In the best tradition of self-declared humour, it's about as funny as a colo-rectal consultation. But worse is the racism. They couldn't see it then. We can't help seeing it now. Some things do improve in this world.

They like a bit of travel writing in the Digest. Wild Lovable Crete begins thus: ‘’Yorgo puffed thoughtfully on his gurgling water pipe. The bells on his sheep jingled musically in the Mediterranean twilight.’’ And the story went on adverbially for another three pages that I somehow couldn't face.

The 70s saw the birth of the women's movement. Let's hear it for Women Drivers, declares a leading article. ‘’These days women don't simply drive cars; they understand them. They can hear a high-pitched whine and know instantly whether it's a problem developing in the fan belt, a policeman closing in from behind, or a wet baby.’’

Oh really.

But I suspect Jan sent me the magazine because of an essay called – and I am not making this up – I am Joe's Bladder. It is written, as the title suggests, in the first person. ‘’… when I'm irritated – by alcohol, worry, infection, spicy food – I can really make Joe step lively … At important business conferences I speak with greater authority than Joe's boss or his clients … I don't ask for attention. I demand it … I will boss Joe for the rest of his days. Now, for example, time to go, Joe.’’

Indeed.