Roger Price (comedy) - Books

Books

Other books by Price included The Great Roob Revolution (Random House, 1970), What Not to Name the Baby and In One Head and Out the Other (Ballantine, 1954), which popularized the catchphrase "I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there." The nonsense non sequitur was immediately adopted by science fiction fandom, appearing occasionally in science fiction fanzines, as noted in Fancyclopedia II (1959):

In Price's In One Head and Out the Other, the bible of Avoidism, his character Clayton Slope "had a clever trick of saying any conceivable sentence so that it sounded like "I had one grunch but the eggplant over there." Fans find the expression useful, too... Avoidism: Not originally fannish at all, but a philosophy devised in a rather stomach-turning book, In One Head and Out the Other, this doctrine became confused/associated with the Gandhi-following folk of Eric Frank Russell's "And Then There Were None". It inspired an APA, MYOB and an Avoidist Movement which avoided amounting to anything. Tenets are those implied by the root word. Lee Hoffman explains that three types of avoidism are distinguished: (1) pure, (2) applied, and 3) active, or Activist. In pure avoiding, one avoids everything except eating, breathing and metabolizing. In applied avoiding, one avoids as many things as possible. (Bus drivers are good at this sort of thing, like avoiding people waiting at bus stops.) Active avoidism isn't true avoidism and is practiced to Publicize the Cause, or as an exercise in Avoiding. Under active avoidism there is the subgroup Counteravoiding; to counteravoid vegetarianism, for instance, one eats meat. Leeh concluded: "A last word on Avoidism: I had one grunch but the eggplant over there."

I'm for Me First (Ballantine, 1954) is a humor book about Herman Clabbercutt's plan to launch a revolutionary political party known as the "I'm for Me First" Party. Price also wrote J.G., the Upright Ape (1960), which publisher Lyle Stuart claimed was one of his worst-selling books. It was described by Robert Michael Pyle in Orion Afield (Autumn 1998):

By chance, when I was buying Daniel Quinn’s book (Ishmael) at Powell’s Books in Portland, I first spotted Roger Price’s J.G., The Upright Ape. This 1960 novel also employs the device of the gorilla as the protagonist. J.G. is a member of a fictional high-elevation subspecies called the silver gorillas. His search for his abducted mate, Lotus, in America becomes a vehicle for sharp, witty satire of contemporary culture. "For the first time in his life, J.G. was unhappy. It required great concentration on his part, because it isn’t easy to be unhappy when you have such a tiny brain." Neither author can challenge Schaller’s and Fossey’s gorilla scholarship, but their fictions point to a conclusion that the researchers might recognize: gorillas—gentle, cooperative, environmentally benign—are in some ways better than humans.