The Honeymooners Companion

The first book to trace the 25-year history of TV's longest-running situation comedy, complete with summaries and plots of more than one hundred episodes, and with more than one hundred rare and nostalgic photographs.

For serious students and fans, notes on how the show was created, written and filmed. (Mostly in chaos and exclamation points. The failsafe: get back to the kitchen table.) For lovers of detail, the Hong Kong Garden Chinese Restaurant, the Bushwick Hospital (where Ed went when a manhole cover landed on his head) and an exhaustive list of 500 Honeymooners references, from Aberdeen Proving Grounds to Ziggy.

Scrapbook-style, with essays, reminiscence, photos, songs ("You're My Greatest Love"), note son Chauncy Street today, and updates on Ralph and Ed and all the Alices and all the Trixies. Plus selected sewer jokes and favorite fat jokes, interviews with Jackie Gleason and his real-life boyhood pals, comments by Audrey Meadows and Art Carney and original contributions by Imogene Coca, Bob Hope, Norman Lear, Sam Levenson, Bob Cummings, Joan Rivers. And away we go! 53,000 copies in print.