Thorne Smith

What happens when a repressed photographer, his box-shaped dog and a secret formula that makes flesh vanish come together?  Ask his hapless wife and the most depraved couple in New York City!

Thorne Smith does it again, with the tale of a statue come to life, a pool that is a veritable Fountain of Youth, a wealthy old man, his wife, and his mistress, a lusty French maid, a half-crazed Japanese butler, a seller of rare pornography and the local fire department,  and what happens when all these things come together.

Hilarity ensues when stuffy coffee magnate Peter Van Dyke, his frigid fiance Yolanda, his passionate secretary Josephine DuVal, a pickpocket and a Bishop are all lost on the fogbound Hudson Bay, and get taken prisoner by one of the maddest nudist colonies ever to remove clothing.

The sequel to TOPPER bring Cosmo Topper, longing for his old adventures with the ghosts of Marion and George Kirby, to the French Riviera.  Alas, since he has come with his stodgy wife, who has quickly acreted a circle of equally stodgy new friends around them, his closest brush with adventure comes with watching The German Model slowly losing more and more of her bathing outfit as she pursues a

Topper was made into at least two movies and a television series, which were fun in their own right, but had none of the risque goings on of the original book. 

I recently rediscovered Thorne Smith, most famously known for TOPPER, which became both movies and a television series. Written in the 1930s, these books were extremely racy for the time, definitely quailfy as "madcap comedies" and often contain elements of fantasy, science fiction or both.