Bon Mots, Wisecracks, and Gags

by Robert E. Drennan

  Broun the columnist was accustomed to hearing such comments at social gatherings as “I always read your column, but I don’t always agree with it.” Once, spotting columnist General Hugh S. Johnson across the room, Heywood approached him and said: “General, 1 always agree with your column, but I never read it.”

  On his first meeting with Ruth Hale, whom he later married, Broun took the young lady for a stroll in Central Park, where she became intrigued with a squirrel which had come begging for food. After listening to Miss Hale’s repeated regrets that she had no peanuts to give the squirrel, Broun remarked, “I can’t help you except to give him a nickel so he can go and buy his own.”

  One February, Broun quoted this statement in his “It Seems to Me” column: “York, Pa.—With the temperature at 10 degrees below zero, the first robin of the year was seen in York yesterday. It was found dead on Penn Common.”

  Discussing boorishness in public places, especially in theaters where “ermined” and “sabled” ladies make concentration somewhat difficult, Broun remarked, “I want some day to see a Broadway opening without benefit of footnotes. I’d rather not be told by the lady just ahead that a line is ‘delicious’ or ‘so quaint.’ I’d rather be surprised.”

  “There is no lantern by which the crank can be distinguished from the reformer when the night is dark. Just as every conviction begins as a whim so does every emancipator serve his apprenticeship as a crank. A fanatic is a great leader who is just entering the room.”

  “Public opinion in this country runs like a shower bath. We have no temperatures between hot and cold.”

  During the run of a Broadway show in which Tallulah Bankhead was starring, Broun whispered to the actress, “Don’t look now, Tallulah, but your show’s slipping.”

  Broun once referred to Alexander Woollcott as “the smartest of Alecs.”

  “A liberal is a man who leaves the room when the fight starts.”

  “She leads away from aces and neglects to keep jump bids alive. But she is still my mother.”

  “Frantic arguments go on and charts and graphs are presented to show that things are better, much worse or just the same. It all depends upon the chartmaker, where the design appears, and whether you have the blame thing right side up.”

  Broun, who was totally captivated by the Marx Brothers, went to see their shows—each one—as many times as possible (he saw Cocoanuts twenty "one times). Concerning this particular passion, he remarked: “Very likely my epitaph will read, ‘Here lies Heywood Broun (Who?), killed by getting in the way of some scene shifters at a Marx Brothers show.’”

  One “l-Can-Give-You-A-Sentence” story Broun was fond of telling involved an overgrown papoose whom the chief expelled from the tribe, saying, “You big! Quit us,” ‘That,” he would explain, “is the origin of ‘ubiquitous.’”

  “Any port in a storm,” Broun once remarked on taking a drink of “a certain inferior liquor.”

  Broun said of one fence-straddling radio commentator, “His mind is so open that the wind whistles through it.”

  Heywood’s mother, who was as conservative as he was liberal, once said to him (as Broun reported it): “The trouble with you, Heywood, is that you have never been an employer.”

  Discussing the difference between his mother’s political views and his own left-wing tendencies, Broun remarked, “When the revolution comes it’s going to be a tough problem what to do with her. We will either have to shoot her or make her a commissar. In the meantime we still dine together.”

  Referring to the popularity of sensational, “sexy” books, which he felt was unwarranted, Broun made this observation: “Obscenity is such a tiny kingdom that a single tour covers it completely.”

  Arriving late at a Thanksgiving weekend party given by the Averell Harrimans, Broun (by then a union leader) alibied: “I was down in the kitchen trying to persuade your butler to strike for higher wages.”

  At the time when the Sacco-Vanzetti appeal from their death sentences was rejected, Heywood referred to Harvard University, some of whose officials had opposed his stand on the case, as “Hangman’s House.”

  “The only real argument for Marriage is that it remains the best method for getting acquainted.”

  In 1933, Broun commented on the state of the theater in New York: “Nothing could have been sicker than the New York stage just one year ago. Practically all the playhouses had gone back to the Indians or the savings banks. Whenever anybody saw a light in any of the theaters he immediately called the police and informed them that mothball burglars were on the rampage once again.”

  “The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts.”

  “I have known people to stop and buy an apple on the corner and then walk away as if they had solved the unemployment problem.”

  “Many people [in the city] buy a house just to get the trees which are thrown in with the deal I’ve got three and a large part of the overhang from a tree next door. This trespasser, from a strictly material standpoint, is a finer tree than any which 1 possess, but 1 prefer my own horse chestnut just the same. It’s a one-man tree and would never think of dividing its loyalty between two houses.”

  “The trouble with me is that I inherited an insufficient amount of vengeful feeling. Kings, princes, dukes, and even local squires rode their horses so that they stepped upon the toes of my ancestors, who did nothing about it except to apologize. 1 would then have joined most eagerly in pulling down the Bastille, but if anybody had caught me at it and given me a sharp look Pm afraid 1 would have put it back again.”

  “Some of my best friends are newspaper photographers. . . . And yet 1 feel that when one or two are gathered together for professional reasons you have a nuisance, and that a dozen or more constitute a plague.”

  “I’d rather be right than Roosevelt,” P

  Discussing popular images of newspapermen, Broun said, “There are exceptions, but when a play includes ‘Jim Swift—Reporter of the Times-Telegram you can be pretty sure that presently there will appear a character compounded out of lago and the protagonist in Ten Nights in a Barroom,”

  “I remember once a dramatist was hailed as a great realist because the reporter in his play was shown with a copy of The American Mercury in one pocket and a quart of whiskey in the other.”

  Feeling guilty about his occasional hobby of fishing, Broun once wrote, “It is not fair that I should thwart and crush great eagerness for existence for the sake of the extremely mild diversion which 1 get from fishing. They told me that the fish cared very little and that they were cold-blooded and felt no pain. But they were not fish who told me.”

  “Any reasonable system of taxation should be based on the slogan of ‘Soak the rich.’”

  “You might not mind so much if your sister married one of them, and two or three asked in after dinner would not for a certainty spoil the party, but taken as a group the drama critics of New York are so much suet pudding.”

  “I was a child prodigy myself. That is, at the age of five 1 already required twelve-year-old pants.”

  One morning, finding a self-analysis questionnaire on his desk, Broun included some of the questions with his answers in that day’s column:

  “What is my occupation? Newspaperman.

  “Am I making a success of it? There seems to be a decided difference of opinion.

  “What is my character and reputation? Unreliable and charming.

  “What do other men think of me? Unreliable.

  “What do I think of myself? Charming.

  “Am I cleanly? Very much so in the summer.

  “Punctual? No.

  “Courteous? To a fault.

  “Have I any definite object in life? Yes. I want to be a writer.

  “Am I on my way? Not precipitately.”

  After a minor operation, Heywood composed the following lyric for his surgeon:

  There was a young man with a hernia

&nbs
p; Who said to his surgeon, “Gol-dernya,

  When carving my middle

  Be sure you don’t fiddle

  With matters that do not concernya.”

  In 1935, following talk of the end of the Depression, Broun offered President Roosevelt a new slogan: “Pinch yourself and see if you’re prosperous.”

  Heywood obviously was not speaking for himself or his Round Table cronies when he stated: “Repartee is what you wish you’d said.”

  “Hell is paved with great granite blocks hewn from the hearts of those who said, 1 can do no other.’”

  ON HUMOR:

  “Humor is the coward’s livery, and there is great wisdom in the popular challenge, ‘Laugh that off.’”

  “Humor is grit in the evolutionary process. ‘Does it matter?’ is the underlying mood in almost every expression of humor. And of course it does matter.”

  George S. Kaufman

  GEORGE S. KAUFMAN [1889-1961], called the “gloomy dean of American humor,” associated in the authorship of more than forty plays and musical comedies. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, for Of Thee I Sing, written with Morrie Ryskind, and You Can’t Take It With You, with Moss Hart. Kaufman preferred to work with a collaborator, writing only one successful play on his own, The Butter and Egg Man. As playwright, producer, and director, he literally reigned on Broadway for more than twenty years, while appearing regularly on radio {“Information, Please”) and television (“This Is Show Business”). His comedies were farcical, fast-moving, gag-filled, and usually mocking in tone. His verbal wit could be sharp and cutting and often cynical His adroitness with language made him a master at punning. Shy, retiring and outwardly nervous, Kaufman remained a hardworking artist and businessman, holding onto his post as New York Times drama critic long after he had succeeded with several Broadway shows.

  During the influenza epidemic of 1918, just after his first play had opened in New York, Kaufman reportedly went around advising people to “avoid crowds—see Someone in the House.”

  As a young theater critic and aspiring playwright, Kaufman was assigned to cover a new Broadway comedy. In his review he wrote: “There was laughter in the back of the theater, leading to the belief that somebody was telling jokes back there.”

  After the flop of his first play, Someone in the House, Kaufman remarked, “there wasn’t.”

  Kaufman and Charlie Chaplin once got into a discussion about personal health. At one point Chaplin announced with pride that his blood pressure was “down to 108,”

  “Common or preferred?” Kaufman inquired.

  One dark, stormy night Kaufman joined Frank Sullivan and Edna Ferber for dinner at a Manhattan restaurant. Over the course of the evening their conversation grew so morbid that G.S.K. suddenly informed the others that he wanted to commit suicide. “How, George?” asked Miss Ferber, somewhat concerned.

  “With kindness,” Kaufman answered.

  “Massey won’t be satisfied until he’s assassinated,” Kaufman remarked about actor Raymond Massey’s heralded performance in Abe Lincoln in Illinois.

  Kaufman once visited the office of Jed Harris, the theater producer, and was received by the unpredictable tycoon stark naked. Accustomed to Harris’ flights of pretentious fancy, Kaufman addressed him calmly: “Mr. Harris, your fly is open.”

  Kaufman collaborated with Morrie Ryskind and George and Ira Gershwin on the musical Strike Up the Band. During the show’s Philadelphia tryout, which was a financial failure, someone approached Kaufman in his hotel lobby and asked, “Mr. Gershwin, why is this show so bad? 1 loved your music.”

  “The show is bad because George Kaufman wrote the book,” G.S.K. replied.

  Conducting a survey for a question-and-answer book he was editing, George Oppenheimer once quizzed Kaufman on geography—a subject that throughly bored G.S.K. One of the questions read: “What is the longest river in South America?”

  After a moment of feigned deliberation, Kaufman queried, “Are you sure it’s in South America?”

  While entertaining musician-wit Oscar Levant at his new Bucks County home, George Kaufman offered his friend an engaging business proposition (based on Levant’s reputation as a noxious influence): “Well both walk through the main thoroughfares of Bucks County and 111 have blueprints in my hand and this will lead people to think that you are going to build and settle down here. The local inhabitants will become panic-stricken and real estate will go down" Then well buy, you won’t build, and well clean up.”

  During a late-hour Thanatopsis game, G.S.K. drew a poor poker hand, studied it in disgust, and announced, “I have been traydeuced.”

  At a Round Table gathering, the subject of Aleck Woollcott’s inevitable failure to marry came under discussion, with Kaufman offering an explanation: “A man sometimes fails to marry because, literally, any one of the women he might want to marry cannot reach him,” When someone complained that G.S.K/s explanation was a trifle obscure, and asked for further clarification, Kaufman said, “It’s quite simple. Have you ever taken a good look at our friend’s paunch?”

  Of the play Skylark, which starred Gertrude Lawrence, G.S.K. declared, “It was a bad play saved by a bad performance.”

  On being asked to describe Alexander Woollcott in one word, G.S.K. concentrated for a moment, then answered, “Improbable.”

  “How many persons,” the playwright once said, “even among your best friends, really hope for your success on an opening night? A failure is somehow so much more satisfying all around.”

  Kaufman once cracked: “Satire is something that closes on Saturday night.”

  During the 30’s, for a period of three to four years, G.S.K. listened to Marc Connelly tell of his alleged progress on a new play. At one point during that period Simon and Schuster (publishers) discovered and published a previously unknown Charles Dickens manuscript entitled Life of Our Lord. Kaufman observed, “Charles Dickens, dead, writes more than Marc Connelly alive.”

  One evening Raoul Fleischmann remarked during a Thanatopsis game that he was fourteen before he real™ ized that he was a Jew. ‘That’s nothing,” said Kaufman. “I was sixteen before ! knew i was a boy.”

  Kaufman once voiced a possible solution to New York City’s traffic problem: “Have all the traffic lights on the streets turn red—and keep them that way.”

  Discussing his first employer, a comptroller for whom he worked as a stenographer, Kaufman remarked, “His title worried me. Finally I figured out that it means a man who begins dictating letters at fifteen minutes to six.”

  Kaufman was seldom open to outside suggestions concerning his work, especially from persons he didn’t know. One self-appointed critic, on being snubbed by G.S.K., remarked, “Perhaps you don’t realize who 1 am?”

  “That’s only part of it,” said Kaufman.

  On the Lucy Stone League—which held, among other things, that women were entitled to keep their individual identities in marriage—G.S.K. commented: “A Lucy Stone gathers no boss.”

  Playing “I-Can-Give-You-A-Sentence,” G.S.K. said to Frank Case, “I know a farmer who has two daughters, Lizzie and Tillie. Lizzie is all right, but you have no idea how punctilious.”

  Kaufman once stated that had it not been for a certain postcard that was lost in the mail—one introducing him as an actor instead of a writer—he might have become a celebrated star. “And today,” he added, “Eugene O’Neill would still be America’s foremost playwright.”

  In an article for the New York Times Magazine, Kaufman wrote: “Having listened for many years to the dramatic opinions of all kinds of persons, I would like to suggest a basic change in the manner of printing the phone directory, so that this generally secondary profession may receive recognition. ‘Baldwin, Walter J.,’ I would have it say, ‘furs and dramatic critic.’ ‘Stuffnagel, Rufus W., garbage collector and dramatic critic.’ And so on.”

  Speaking of Boston as a try-out city for potential Broadway plays, Kaufman said: “In Boston the test of a play is simple. If th
e play is bad the pigeons snarl at you as you walk across the Common.”

  “When I was born I owed twelve dollars.”

  Kaufman told this story about his young daughter. She went to see Pride and Prejudice while it was playing across the street from First Lady, a comedy he had co-authored. “Daddy,” she told him later, “when I left the theater I looked across the street and saw only three people leaving your theater. The attendance must have fallen off terribly.”

  Kaufman explained that First Lady was a longer play, so that it ended fifteen minutes later than Pride and Prejudice.

  “So,” the girl returned, “they were walking out on you, eh?”

  On the movie set of Stage Door, which Kaufman referred to as “Screen Door,” the playwright and his coauthor, Edna Ferber, became exasperated while trying to cast a woman pianist who could act, or vice versa. At one point Kaufman remarked, “It begins to appear, my dear Edna, that we are trying to find a hen’s tooth that can recite ‘Gunga Din’ with feeling.”