Jape on Tape

OUT OF THE RED (244 pp.)--Caskie St;nnetf--Random House ($3.95).

The small island of Equatoria floats like a banana peel on the blue ocean swell of the Caribbean. The democratic Equatori-ans are engaged in their annual ritual revolution, and two local swindlers named Lopez and Pardo dread the rising "reform" dictator. Lopez mulcts tourists and gets a kickback from the police. This pair of wily thugs equip shifts of demonstrators to parade before the U.S. embassy with slogans suggesting that the latest revolutionary coup is a Communist takeover. The hoax works. Soon U.S. planes are flying the Equatorian "Freedom Fighters" to Washington. The fact that the "resistance heroes" consist mainly of Lopez, Pardo and nightclub floozies scarcely fazes ERRA, the Equatorian Refugee Relief Administration, which is shortly manned by 3,000 paper shufflers. Since "revolutions become habit-forming," Lopez and Pardo vamoose, and the Equatorian girls run away to strip houses to practice "the coldest profession."

P:ERRA carries on in Washington, partly because Malcolm West, the public relations hero of Out of the Red, is the only man in the bureau who actually knows and rather relishes the fact that there is nothing left to administer. When his comic invention flags, Author. Stinnett pads with ferocious puns ranging from descriptions of lustful pals ("a wolf in cheap clothing") to abstract art ("a merry old mobile").

As a onetime paper-proliferator and information-spreader for the War Production Board, Humorist Caskie Stinnett, 47, knows his subject but does not really know what to do with it. The trouble is that bureaucracy all but defies satire--because it is satire. The facts are funnier than any imaginable fiction.

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