Collecting Himself

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Collecting Himself Page 18

by Michael J. Rosen


  Groucho’s book might have been subtitled “How I Ran an Allowance of Five Cents a Week into an Income of $18,000 a Week, with a Vicuña Coat and Two Cadillacs Thrown In.” Money plays a big part in this, as in any other American success story, and in a chapter called “How I Starred in the Follies of 1929” he tells how he lost nearly a quarter of a million in the stock market crash. (That May 1929 New Yorker piece of his was indeed prophetic.)

  The stock market did not make bums out of the Marxes. It was a kind of godsend, for in 1931 they went to Hollywood where their guardian angel introduced them to Irving Thalberg, the man responsible for the screening of A Day at the Races and that finest of all Marx masterpieces, A Night at the Opera. The book gleams and glitters with the names of show business and show art. George Kaufman is praised for his valuable contribution to the Marx success, and we meet, or rather Groucho met, Charlie Chaplin when the Little Man was making only fifty bucks a week in an act called “A Night at the Club.”

  Everything in the book is fresh and new, for neither Julius nor Groucho included any of his earlier writings. Those two share a cold eye, a warm heart, and a quick perception. Groucho and Me is an important contribution to the history of show business and to the saga of American comedy and comedians, comics and comicality.

  * * *

  JAMES THURBER PRESENTS

  Der Tag aux Courses

  The gentlemen pictured on the opposite page were, as everybody knows, the central figures in Das Duck Soup and other things of the sort, and are not to be confused with—or even by, as far as that goes—the author of Das Kapital, who wore a beard and looked a little like Sanity Clause (Karl Marx, 1818-1883). The Marx Brothers (1776-2937) are not, as a matter of fact, to be confused by anybody. You may remember that on one occasion when a suspicious plainclothes man, observing that, whereas only two Marxes were seated at a certain breakfast table, there were nevertheless covers laid for twice as many, said sharply, “This table is set for four,” Groucho, in no wise confused, replied, “That’s nothing, the alarm clock is set for eight.” If nothing else set off the Marx Brothers from Karl Marx that would. Karl Marx had the sort of mind which, faced with the suggestion that the stolen painting was hidden in the house next door, would, on learning that there was no house next door, never have thought to build one. Here is where, again, he parts company with the Marx Brothers. The significance of this divergence becomes clear when it is known that the Marx Brothers recovered the painting. If that is a horse below, and if it isn’t we’ll build one, it is one of a number of objects that help litter up the forthcoming Marx Brothers picture, A Day at the Races (Der Tag aux Courses).

  Speaking of Humor …

  You have to enjoy humorous writing while you’re doing it. Anybody who says he doesn’t is lying (he may, of course, not like to start). You’ve got to be enjoying it. You can’t be mad, or bitter, or irate. If you are it will be no good…. The things we laugh at are awful while they are going on, but get funny when we look back. And other people laugh because they’ve been through it too. The closest thing to humor is tragedy.

  My English teacher at Ohio State, Herman A. Miller, told me of something he saw which illustrates this.

  One gray and snowy Sunday morning, about 10 o’clock, a smallish husband leading a little fluffy dog on a leash went into a delicatessen store to buy food. Herman said he looked like the cartoon of the Common People in the conventional political caricature. Well, his wife had given him a formidable list of things to buy, so that when he came out of the store both arms were laden with butter, bread, eggs, oranges, etc. It was a problem to handle the dog and the bundles both. Finally, the dog made a lunge and broke away. The man stood there juggling his bundles, dropping one, picking it up, dropping another, calling “Here doggie, here doggie” all the time; then finally setting out onto the icy street, gingerly, in pursuit of the dog. Before he got to it a car rounded a corner and struck the dog and killed it. The little man just stood there blinking, holding his bundles. That was the highest point of sadness in the scene, all right. But then, still bewildered, always the husband who had to get the groceries home, he tried to pick the dog up and still hold the bundles. After dropping the butter and bread he had to drop the dog again to pick them up. In this amazing moment there was that almost crazy laugh, for here, so closely joined as to be almost incredible, was pathos and slapstick. Herman used to relate that story to his class and ask their opinion of whether it was funny, sad, horrible, or what. And why.

  EDITOR’S NOTE: For the source of each interview or article, please see the Notes on page 259, matching the key word at the end of each excerpt with the list’s respective entry.

  I think humor is the best that lies closest to the familiar, to that part of the familiar which is humiliating, distressing, even tragic. Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect. There is always a laugh in the utterly familiar. If a play is going on on the stage, a love scene, say, and from the wings a Scotty should wander on, with muddy paws, having got away from its owner’s dressing room, and if the Scotty should jump up on the best sofa and lie down, it would be funnier than if a kangaroo popped in. There’d be a laugh at the kangaroo, too. The laughers would think “that poor sap!” (of the man in the love scene). There you’d have your sense of superiority in a laugh. In the case of the Scotty, however, the laughers would say, “Just what Rowdy did when the Smiths called that time.” This is my way, anyway, I think. People can laugh out of a kind of mellowed self-pity as well as out of superiority.

  Human dignity, the humorist believes, is not only silly but a little sad. So are dreams and conventions and illusions. The fine brave fragile stuff that men live by. They look so swell, and go to pieces so easily.

  You know that hysterical laugh that people sometimes get in the face of the Awful. Maybe it’s the rockbottom of humor. Anyway it exists. [EASTMAN]

  “Waterville”

  Paget East, Bermuda

  June 9, 1954

  Dear Mr. Landau:

  You may have a point in what you say about the effect of humor on Stevenson’s defeat, but after all the score against him was only 33 to 27. If we have to have Zeitgeist in the case of humor, Time magazine may be right in indicating that humor is a diminishing thing. One of its primary elements is the unexpected, and if people have to be all prepared for that, they might be let down a little. I think Louis Kronenberger is right when he says that Americans do not have a basic humorous sense, but are rather more jolly and open-hearted than humorous. In such a nation humor is always a little suspect, but so are modern music and painting and anything intellectual.

  The subject of children and humor is one of the hardest I can think of. It often lies close to the grisly for them. Not many adults have the kind of total recall that lets them remember what was funny to them as children. In the many letters I have got from children, usually about my fairy tales, they rarely pick out anything funny as having interested them. They seem to like the weird and the grotesque more, and to pick out strange or colorful characters as such, rarely mentioning anything these characters say. The humor of action seems to be their favorite type. I often wonder what the average child would think of The Innocent Voyage. Kids also seem to be amused by any kind of accident at all, no matter how gory its results. All this shows up in the trend toward horror that began so long ago in the comic books, which I understand are no longer comic at all.

  These are merely offhand comments on a subject I have often intended to go into more deeply….

  Cordially yours,

  JAMES THURBER

  P.S. When my own daughter was about 6, she assured me one day that Munro Leaf was “the funniest writer.” It seems she liked his series of books with such titles as Arithmetic Can Be Fun, or whatever they were. She also was more delighted when I talked bad French or German to her, than by anything of mine in English, when she was 8 to io. They all seem to love strange sounding words, alliterative sentences, and the like, whether
they get the meaning of it or not. Also, there have been a great many times when I haven’t had the vaguest idea of what the hell they were laughing about. They have a lot of secret areas of laughter, such as the giggles. I doubt that anything giggled about by children is actually very funny. [LANDAU]

  West Cornwall

  Connecticut

  June 25,

  1954 Dear Mr. Landau:

  I read your letter again after I got home from Bermuda, because I had heard on radio a couple of brief references to humor that interested and surprised me. Mr. Welch, in his closing talk the last day of the famous hearings, said something about “getting back to humor,” and on a public forum John Chamberlain… said that Cohn and Adams had been talking humor and not making threats in their original exchanges that caused all the trouble. Here again we find the idea, curious to me, of taking humor off and putting it on like a blazer or an overcoat. All this supports the contention of Kronenberger that our conception of humor is not deep-seated or basic. It seems to me that true humor should be an integral part of human nature, something like heart action or breathing. In some poem or other A. E. Housman has a line like this: “Straps on the sword that cannot save.” If humor is something like a sword, maybe it has to be strapped on, but nobody should go around without it in any period of time. It is like imagination, one of the necessary accessories of fortitude. Since one of its chief constituents is taste, it should be used sparingly sometimes and left in its sheath at other times, but it should always be handy. This purely American idea of getting out of it and getting back to it seems to me fundamentally unhumorous and even antihumorous. Lincoln, as everybody knows, began all his Cabinet meetings during the Civil War with some joke, momentarily wiping the blood of the Antietam off the old sabre. Even then there were those who criticized him for levity during tragedy.

  It was only a few years ago that some perceptive Englishman pointed out the basic silliness of Horatio Nelson’s famous last words, “Kiss me, Hardy,” and proved his conviction that what the dying man really said was, “Kismet, Hardy,” that is to say, “This is it,” or, as they say in Bermuda, “I’ve had my chocolate.” Nobody had ever laughed before at the hilarious picture of a stern old sea-dog asking another stern old sea-dog to kiss him, so it all depends….

  Cordially yours,

  JAMES THURBER

  P.S. It seems to me that Chamberlain and McCarthy are way off about humor and confuse it with kidding around, a coarse form of mental horseplay. Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin. [LANDAU]

  [In response to the idea of “cruel humor” Thurber counters:] I don’t think that those two words can be used together. By definition, humor is gentle. The savage, the cruel, the harsh would fall under the heading of wit and/or satire, as the lawyers say. Now, my definitions are these: The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people—that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature. [SMALL WORLD]

  Intoning is almost impossible in humor, which cannot afford the ornaments and indulgences of fine writing, the extravagance of consciousness-streaming, or lower case unpunctuation meanderings. There is a sound saying in the theatre: “You can’t play comedy in the dark.” I saw Jed Harris and Billy Rose trying to disprove this one night in Philadelphia twenty-five years ago when they put on an 8-minute Don Marquis skit in absolute darkness: the sounds of voices, glasses, and the cash register of an old-time beer saloon. People fell asleep, or began coughing, or counting their change, or whispering to their neighbors, or reading their programs with pencil flashlights. Comedy has to be done en clair. You can’t blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear. [COWLEY LETTER]

  The word “funny” has come to mean almost everything except just that. It can mean crazy, as in Funny House; peculiar, as in “She’s funny that way”; ominous, as in “That’s funny—they don’t answer”; mysterious, as in the feminine “How do you make this do-funny work?”; stunned or silly, as in “Watch it, Mac, or I’ll punch you funny”; and strange or terrible, as in “It’s a funny world.”

  Art Buchwald, a prominent nonconformist, insists on being funny in the good old-fashioned way—that is, amusing, entertaining, and hilarious. In the various capitals of the world, ancient mariners and others stop me and say, “Is he a man or a myth?” To this I always say, “Just wait until you see him.” When they see him, they know that he is a man, a lot of man, but that is oversimplification. He is a man with winged feet and winged words, who gets around the world in person and in prose, and his new book [More Caviar] proves that. It also proves that he is a sharp observer of his strange species and one of the best reporters now reporting. My own close investigation of Art Buchwald, as man and myth, has revealed that he is half Falstaff, half Hamlet, an Aw Shucks cosmopolite, a great big good-natured aesthete, a monastic gadabout, a loyal husband and devoted father, in spite of his striking resemblance to the late Rudolph Valentino and the magic spell he casts in the glittering salons and shady hide-outs of Paris, London, New York and other dangerous cities.

  “Did you read Art Buchwald today?” has become as commonplace as the inevitable answer, “I certainly did.” [BUCHWALD]

  Humor isn’t considered one of the major arts…. The best essay on humor I know was written by Andy White in A Subtreasury of American Humor. I guess books of humor don’t last because, like the passions, humor is a changing thing. It is likely to date because it deals in the modern idiom. I wonder about Babbitt, whether the humor in that wouldn’t date? According to Mencken, there are only two American novels, Babbitt and Huck Finn. The best estimate of my work was done by T. S. Eliot…. Most humorous books date and the serious books don’t. When you see As You Like It you know it was written over 250 years ago. [Of Tristram Shandy:] I haven’t tried those old books. I can’t get through Pickwick Papers. And don’t forget there’s a cult around the old work which makes it difficult to know when it’s funny and when it’s supposed to be funny. I can’t remember any humor in old Scott Fitzgerald. Humor would have saved him. It seems to me the great novelists have humor in them, even if it isn’t predominent. The Russians had it; Gogol had it, and Dostoevsky. It seems to me Fitzgerald strangled humor because he was caught in the romantic tradition. Well, there isn’t a trace of humor in Communism, is there? I think any political system that vehemently attacks humor reveals a great weakness. It is one of the dangers universally. One of the great things we have here is humor—even in war. We ought not to lose that. [BREIT—2]

  When Life called me “mild” in 1945 my old friend NunnallyJohnson said, “It must be a misprint for ‘wild.’” Boris Karloff is mild but I am not. Other mild guys are James Cagney and Peter Lorre unless backed into a corner. I am in a corner without being backed there and often come out fighting. [LIFE]

  A certain professor of English in America has written a dissertation on my work, in which he speaks of my “major phase” as if it were in the past. If it is in the past, I shall demote it from major to sergeant, for a man’s major phases, whether he be a writer or President of the United States, should be ahead of him, and not behind him. [TIME]

  The State of Humor in the States

  Is there a national sense of humor, or does it vary regionally, like accents, climate, idioms, crops, and politics? I am not peering at you over professorial spectacles, class, but merely reporting a question often asked me since “A What’s-his-name Carnival” took to the road last January to play Columbus, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, New York, and Central City, Colorado, the famous town up mountain a piece from Denver. The question calls for careful investigation,
perhaps by a Congressional subcommittee, since humor, as we all know, is American, and its disappearance would therefore be un-American, but I’ll take a unilateral swing at it, anyway.

  First of all, the restless flux and shift of considerable portions of our population has brought to each of these cities to live many former residents of all the others. In Denver one hears as often as in New York, “Oh, but I wasn’t born here.” There are in Denver a hundred and fifty graduates and former students of my own university, Ohio State. I should say that humor, such as it is today, is national with, of course, regional and local variants. Any nationalistic phenomenon is possible in a country in which the famous Giants and the immortal Dodgers now represent, respectively, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

  If we are in a period of decadence—that is, retrogression in literature and art—as I believe we are, then comedy, being literature and one of the arts, is bound to have declined, and indeed it has. During the dark decade now coming happily to a close, it took, as every thinking person knows, a beating from both the far Left and the far Right. Let me report at once, however, that I have been cheered by signs of its coming revival, for humor is innate and resilient. If I may brag a little (and I shall, whether I may or not), Carnival broke a twenty-nine-year-old record for the opera house in Central City by selling out completely for the month of August before it opened. Not only that, but three extra performances had to be put on. It is true that Mae West in Diamond Lil also sold out in advance, many years ago, but its run was much shorter and tickets cost far less. It was heartening to hear Americans laughing again at my occasional kidding of the faults and foibles of Congress and government, but then, it is only fair to say, I had heard the same hearty laughter at the line “You can’t quarantine a congressman” in Teahouse of the August Moon and the repeated “the goddam Senate” in The Solid Gold Cadillac. This may mean that more people than I had hoped read Elmer Davis’s But We Were Born Free, which featured that great and valiant American’s injunction to us all, “Don’t let them scare you.”

 

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