Literary tickles

[Shem the Penman]

Isn't there a tickling scene in Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil as well? I'd check but I don't have a copy on my shelf -- I recall a couple bits with one of the female characters squealing "Don't tickle!"

Another couple of scenes:

In Scott Ciencin's The Lurker Files: Nemesis, there's a part where the hero -- on campus patrol -- hears screams from within the chemistry lab. Breaking in, he finds a guy there with his barefoot girlfriend; apparently he's been tickling her with various things he found around the lab.

There's also a tickle fight in the Sweet Valley Junior High book Clueless, but as it involves minors, I shan't go into specifics.

(And no, I do Not read Sweet Valley books for entertainment. I was previously employed as a copy editor of, among other things, children's and young adult books, which is where I came across that one.)

 

[Boomtown13]

Mentioning books for kids and young adults, Shem reminds me that in Chamber of Secrets, that great and powerful pubescent wizard-in-training, Harry Potter, uses a "tickle spell" on Malfoy during a duel.

 

[drkjedi458]

help!

i was gonna post a thread on this but this looks like the best place to begin the hunt. has anybody read a story called the screaming laugh by cornell woolrich? it can be found in a book called great tales of horror and the supernatural or something like that. can anybody give me any details on this story and tell me if its worth my time tracking it down?

 

[dig dug dog]

Dear Shem,

Uh huh, yes indeed..."copy editor"..."young adults", of course, we believe you 😉

dig dug

P.S. I dedicate this, my 800th post, to Shem's erudition and vast repertoire of tickle information.

 

[Shem the Penman]

Re "The Screaming Laugh" -- I haven't read it, but a bit of prowling around the Web (Google is your friend) turned up a synopsis -- http://rope_jock.tripod.com/archives/messages401/22089.html (WARNING: contains spoilers for the story.)

It's apparently an m/m foot tickling scene, which won't be everyone's cup of tea. Those curious to read the actual story ought to check out a recently released collection of Woolrich's stories, Rear Window.

 

[Synful Pryde]

you recall incorrectly, I'm afraid. The only thing I'm not entirely sure about is the ending, which either had the kids let go, or the aliens may have decided to keep them on for future entertainment, being taken back to their planet as jesters or something.

Hmm ... I was sure that the kids tried to tickle the aliens, which didn't work. I vaguely remember the aliens' faces being described as "blank onions" or something. And then the alien king guy said to take the kids to a vaporisation chamber or something, and the kids started crying. The aliens thought it was hilarious that "water pours from their eyes", but they laughed so much that their stomachs hurt. And they remembered why their race had stopped laughing, because it hurt when they did it too much. I -think- the kids were going to be vaporised anyway, but I'm -positive- that the last line was "I didn't know whether to laugh or cry."

Hmm... Someone must have this lying around somewhere.

~Syn

 

[edv]

hmmmnnn...

Perhaps someone can help me here. An author named Wlliam Gaddis wrote a book a few years ago wich featured a man who tortured his sister with tickling. I cannot recall the name of the book for the life of me. I think it was published in 1997 or 98. I posted someithing about it on amt at the time. Anyone?

 

[Strelnikov]

More Heinlein

Shem, you're right about "I Will Fear No Evil." I suspect that RAH was "one of us."

Strelnikov

 

[qjakal]

Yup...

We've had this conversation before..lol..and I suspect Strel is RH, hiding and in retirement, happily tickling his declining years away! Q

 

[ontheverge]

A few I've come across

OK. Now.

- Sex: an Oral History, ed. Harry Maurer. Series of interviews about sex. A husband and wife are interviewed separately; both talk at length about the wife's need to be tickled virtually every day.

- Pierrot assassin de sa femme (pierrot The Wife-Killer). Paul Margeritte. Re-working of the commedia dell'arte character Pierrot, where the jester is rash, evil, and cannot control his erotic desires. Pierrot murders his companion, Colombine, by tying her to the bed in her sleep and tickling her feet until she laughs herself to death. I don't know if there's an English translation; original is in French.

--Forbidden Flowers, ed. Nancy Friday. Compendiium of women's sexual fantasied. Pg 188 describes a woman who wants to be tied down and tickled by hooded figures.

--Joy of Sex. Alex Comfort. Mentions ticklng very briefly in the section about feet.

--Judy Blume books: several of them mention tickling...Sally J. Friedman, Deenie, Tiger Eyes are 3 definites.

--The Story of Venus and Tannhauser. Aubrey Beardsley. The entire story is composed of unconventional sex acts, some of which involve tickling.

They're the ones I can think of right now. I know there are more -- they'll come to me.

 

[edv]

FYI

The book by William Gaddis Is titled "A Frolic of His Own". That was driving me crazy, I'm glad I remembered that! Also "The Joy of Touch" Has a whole chapter as well as a demonstrative pictoral on the subject of tickling. AND.....a book on sex by Drew Barrymoore's mother, Jaid Barrymore includes an entire chapter devoted to tickling.
Again the title of the book escapes me, but the opening line of the chapter went something like "Tickling........just hearing the word makes me smile." Me too Jaid, me too.


Love, peace & chicken grease

Ed
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

 

[Sunriseticklee]

I remember this sesame street book my mom read to me when I was a really little kid... the whole book was about how Grover was getting tickled by everyone in sight. Thanks mom 😀

I swear Grover was a tickle fetish puppet...he was always getting kids on the sesame street TV show to tickle him. Which is kinda creepy, since he's a puppet and can't really feel it.

I remember that book... I checked it out of the public library every week until my mother told me I was NO longer allowed to get it. LOL

I used to read it over and over and over.... There was actually a picture of this wild looking tickle machine that gets him all over his body. It had feathers and hands and arms coming out of it....

WOW.... There were so many clues growing up.... I was pretty young when I did that. I had forgotten all about it.

This is cool!

Live Laugh and TICKLE
Sunrise

 

[giggledude]

Sesame Street seemed to make a recurring theme of tickling. In some number-related storybook, there was a story I read to my nephew in which a group of dragons terrorize a baseball team, so that they tickle the dragons, but then it all starts again when they stop. The Big Kahuna might be an old book I saw when I was young, *The Sesame Street Storybook*, with a different story for each letter of the alphabet, in which the story for T is a poem about a visit to the town of Tombstone from The Terrible Tickler, who tickles all the kids, adults and animals, then has nothing to do but ride away while tickling himself. I noticed TSSS in a discount store a few years ago, but not since. There was also a little booklet I saw, which I think but can't be sure had a Sesame Street affiliation, though not with muppets, called Tickle Yourself With Puzzles. I can recall three illustrations - on the back cover, a boy and girl lay on a rug, laughing while their dog rapidly wagged its tail to tickle their bare feet. On the front cover an old man with a long beard napped in an armchair while the boy and girl giggled before him, their legs in the air so that their feet were tickled by his beard. On the inside page, the old man's legs were stretched out so that only his heels were on the floor, his slippers and socks having vanished; the kids, still barefoot themselves, tickled the old man's bare feet with his own beard while they all laughed, but the old man's eyes were closed and he might still have been asleep.

 

[daryl]

Sunrise:

I think a lot of parents are either too vanilla to think in those terms, or are just accepting of it. In other words, they see the signs and decide to leave people to be themselves. I'm sure people around me growing up suspected.

 

[U.N.Owen]

I had that Sesame Street story book. When I was a kid, I was practically obsessed with that "Terrible Tickler" story. Right now, I could recite the entire poem to you -- and the book's been buried in the basement for about 15 years! There were tickle references int he actual show, too. I remember one where tickling was included on a list of the great things you could do with the letter T. I loved that, since it was such an obvious endorsement of tickling!

On a more adult note, what about the book, "The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe"? I've heard about it, but never seen it. I gather that has some tickling discussion in it?

 

[dig dug dog]

There is an interesting tome called "The Hand Book" (written by Linda Lee and James Charlton; published in 1980 by Prentice-Hall). As the title implies, it is all about the human hand in history and culture.

In the chapter on "The Hands and Sex" there are a couple of very nice pages on tickling (pp.227-231). It concludes with a wonderful paragraph that could be the motto of our Forum:

"In both tickling and sex, with two people under the right circumstances there is the proper, wholehearted, unfaked response. But in tickling, unlike in sex, you can't please yourself *by yourself*. Logically, then, in human evolution, we should reproduce not by enjoying sex but by tickling."

AMEN.

dig dug dog

 

[Sunriseticklee]

Sunrise:

I think a lot of parents are either too vanilla to think in those terms, or are just accepting of it. In other words, they see the signs and decide to leave people to be themselves. I'm sure people around me growing up suspected.

When my mother DID find out this year, I think what shocked her the most (besides the initial... ok, where is my daughterand is she with that old murdering tickling freak!) was the fact that in her minds eye, I could NOT stand being touched by anyone.

In front of my parents and my family, I was a very quiet, almost sullen child who would not really interact with anyone, least of all them. I was just very unhappy growing up for various reasons....

But when I finally started dating... (in college) she would see me rolling all over the place being tickled by EVERY boyfriend I had. You would think that THAT would be the biggest clue of all.

I just think that she had no idea that a "tickling fetish" even existed. I mean, it was a long time before I did. But hey! She's been to TMF compliments of my computer (the day she found out) So now she knows a lot. LOL 😀

You know... even before I knew (going back to the literary thread), I loved to write stories as a child and almost every lengthy story I wrote had this big tickle scene in it. Every single one. LOL But I never thought it was strange.

Hmm....
Live, Laugh and TICKLE
Sunriseticklee

 

[giggledude]

*The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe* only had about two pages dealing with foot-tickling, briefly touching on the essentially sexual nature of the response and practice in Egyptian and Russian courts, then instancing a New York socialite's confession to her psychiatrist about having her dogs lick food off her feet, and the author's discovering some foot tocklers in a Russian museum, where he was quietly informed that they were currently still used. It was a sort of notch in the chapter on foot sex. I don't have the book, and last saw it a few years ago, but I think that's fairly accurate.

 

[munchausen]

Piers Anthony

By the way, Piers Anthony has tickling (none of it very extended or detailed) in several books. One very interesting line in the book Centaur Aisle: "She was very ticklish, perhaps because it was fashionable for young ladies to be so."

 

[ticklemad]

tickling in fiction

James Herbert - The magic Cottage has a great scene where the wife is sat on husbands knee and he puts his hands up her nightshirt and tickles her ribs until she falls beteween his legs onto a cold stone floor, where he lifts her up and takes her to bed for some more.

I also remember as a kid in the 70's a Denis the Menace Annual that had a cartoon story of Beryl the Peril - the whole cartoon was taken up of Beryl, trying to wake her dad up and tyinf him to the bed and tickling his feet, he was begging with her to lte him go and screaming and laughing in print, the cartoon picies that went with it were brilliant

 

[LicknTickleFeet]

tickling in fiction

In Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor a sentence jumped out at me. Amid the history of one of the forebears of Lake Wobegon - Magnus Oleson - it mentions, "He enjoyed having his feet tickled."

 

[Jerry67911]

Re; Tabitha's Tickle and Tabitha's Tease

Here's an email response I got from the author of the Tabitha series. I wish I could get a copy sooner.

Dear Jerry,

Many thanks for writing. A new publisher, Magic Carpet Books, has purchased rights to both the Tabitha books, but I don't have any information from them as to when I might see them back in print. They're a startup, so things are confusing at best. I wish I had better news for you, but, alas, that's all I have. Please drop me a line again in six months or so and I'll happily share any new information I have. It's too bad that erotica publishing has fallen on hard times these last few years; I've got two more completed books that were to be published by Masquerade and now are orphans looking for new homes.

I also post news (when I have it) and the occasional new story on ntcweb's orgasm denial forum, so you might check there from time to time for any updates. Thanks again for your interest.

Best,

Robin Wilde