Alfred D’Alessandro ’76 Recommends Humor

D’Alessandro’s unapologetically “un-Ivy” memoir is The B-Side of Paradise

Courtesy of Alfred D’Alessandro ’76

By James Swinehart ’27

Published Dec. 16, 2025

2 min read

While most at Princeton major in public policy or liberal arts, Alfred D’Alessandro ’76 says he studied the student body. Though his profile on TigerNet would argue that he actually majored in history, his memoir The B-Side of Paradise certainly reveals the Animal House-esque tales of Ivy Club and Dead Poets Society-type classroom stories one would expect from a self-proclaimed student body major.

After his time at Princeton, D’Alessandro worked in publishing. He also founded the No-Spot Film Festival for Advertising Age, a forum for agency creatives to showcase “non-commercial” narrative and documentary films. D’Alessandro’s crowning achievement, though, is his latest memoir. As he summed up his career: “Yadda. Yadda. Yadda. And then I wrote a book.”

D’Alessandro’s 1970s romp as a first-generation student through Princeton plays a bit differently than the F. Scott Fitzgerald 1917 novel it’s named after. It’s a memoir that is unapologetically “un-Ivy,” full of the fun and friendship that inspired the author during his time at Princeton. When asked to recommend three other humorous books that inspired him, D’Alessandro recommended these.

Candide

By Voltaire

Three things I like about Voltaire’s Candide: 1) He takes on the people moving the big chess pieces of 18th century Europe with a sensibility as modern as Kubrick and as absurd and hilarious as Monty Python. 2) He punches up but never down in a way that has been all but lost in contemporary satire. 3) His main character’s misadventures with cannibals, shipwreck, and torture always remind me of my first year at Princeton. (a beat) Which makes this staple of the Western canon a great companion piece to The B-Side of Paradise. Five Paws!

The cover of "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories," with an illustration of a couple standing in front of a 1950's house and car.

Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories: And Other Disasters

By Jean Shepherd

From the author who inspired the movie A Christmas Story, this collection of Depression-era short stories is like fine dining for the connoisseur of comic art. If prose was food, Shepherd’s idealization of the fair-haired ninth-grader Daphne Bigelow in “…The Spine-Chilling Saga,” is Shakespeare meets Escoffier. By comparison, my writing is the toothless baked ziti and carrots steamed to within an inch of their lives they served in my high school cafeteria. That said, Shep is a consummate B-Sider, and his nostalgic vignettes from the 1930s pair well with a good ’70s Princeton memoir. Five Paws.

Carry On, Jeeves

By P.G. Wodehouse

As you might imagine, it’s not easy for me to pass on This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald’s prequel to The B-Side. But I’m a sucker for a good yarn about an idle bachelor who takes his Green Swizzle before noon.

Wodehouse’s tales of the properly rich Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves have been compared to Charles Dickens, Charlie Chaplin, and a Broadway musical. I wouldn’t know. I just like that his characters, especially Aunt Agatha, Honoria Glossop, and Rosie M. Banks — romance writer for Wodehouse’s fictional women’s paper Milady’s Boudoir — are dead ringers for some of the guys I knew at Ivy Club. Five Paws and Green Swizzles all around.