The Night Life of the Gods

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.

Brilliant and very wealthy scientist Hunter Hawk has a knack for annoying his ultrarespectable but feckless relatives who are leeching on him after losing their own fortune. He
likes to experiment and he particularly likes to experiment with
explosives. His attic-cum-laboratory is a veritable minefield, replete
with evil-smelling clouds of vapor through which various bits of wreckage and mysteriously bubbling test tubes are occasionally visible. With the help of Megaera, a fetching nine-hundred-year-old lady, daughter of a ne'er-do-well drunken
leprechaun and a Medusa whom he meets one night in the woods, he masters the art (if not
the timing) of transforming statues into people and vice versa, mirroring Megaera's magical power. After scandalizing and terrifying the neighborhood he and Megaera go to New York, where he uses his new power in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art--
setting Bacchus, Mercury, Neptune, Diana, Hebe, Apollo, and
Perseus (not to mention the disembodied head of Medusa) loose on the unsuspecting citizenry of Prohibition-era New
York, and hilarity ensues.