Kaufman wrote the comedy Cocoanuts (in collaboration with Morrie Ryskind and Irving Berlin) for his friends the Marx Brothers. Concerning this experience, Kaufman said; “Cocoanuts introduced me to the Marx Brothers. Cocoanuts was a comedy, the Marx Brothers are comics, meeting them was a tragedy.”
While rehearsing Cocoanuts, Kaufman and the Marx Brothers fell into an argument over a piece of stage business. Groucho, in an attempt to justify his stand, remarked, “Well, they laughed at Fulton and his steamboat”
“Not at matinees,” replied Kaufman.
Eleanor Roosevelt told of the time when Kaufman, after dining at the White House, said to her, “You have a good location, good food, and Fm sure the place should be a great success when it’s noised around a bit.”
Hollywood’s Adolph Zukor was said to have offered a trifling $30,000 for movie rights to a Kaufman play. The playwright sent back a telegram offering Zukor $40,000 for Paramount.
Ruth Gordon once described to G.S.K. a new play in which she was appearing: “In the first scene I’m on the left side of the stage, and the audience has to imagine I’m eating dinner in a crowded restaurant. Then in scene two I run over to the right side of the stage and the audience imagines I’m in my own drawing room.”
G.S.K. listened, then mused, “And the second night you have to imagine there’s an audience out front.”
Referring to a belligerent author well known for his social criticism, Kaufman remarked, “He’s in the chips now—but most of them seem to have stayed on his shoulders.”
Herbert Bayard Swope, who had a penchant for dining at odd hours, called G.S.K. one evening at 9:30 and asked, “What are you doing for dinner tonight?”
“I’m digesting it,” Kaufman replied.
As a panelist on the television show “This Is Show Business”—which Kaufman called “This Ain’t Show Business”—the playwright was asked to comment on “the value of clothes to a performer.”
“Clothes cannot be terribly important,” he answered, “because if they were, the Duchess of Windsor would be the greatest performer on any stage today.”
One evening on “This Is Show Business,” a nonsinging actor from a Broadway musical complained that he never got a chance to sing. Said Kaufman: “Why don’t you some night just break out and sing? Who can stop you? You’re stronger than Gertrude Lawrence. Just do it For good measure, sing an Irving Berlin tune and get me a close-up of Mr. Rodgers’ face at the time.”
Beatrice Kaufman one afternoon met so many friends and relatives—from her native Rochester—on Fifth Avenue that she said to George, “Ail Rochester must be in New York this week.”
“What a fine time to visit Rochester,” Kaufman observed.
G.S.K’s daughter once informed him that a friend of hers from Vassar had eloped. Kaufman remarked philosophically, “Ah! She put her heart before the course.”
Alexander Woollcott, who collaborated with Kaufman on The Dark Tower, told of a rehearsal when one of the players, doomed by his role to enlarge himself with padding, cried out, “I certainly hate to walk out on the stage with a big paunch,” There was a moment of embarrassing silence, broken by Kaufman saying gravely, “You have grossly insulted Alexander Woollcott.”
A story has it that a “blue-blooded” guest staying at the Algonquin became overbearing one evening in describing his impressive lineage: “I can trace my family back to the Crusades,” he said.
“I had such an ancestor, too,” replied Kaufman. “Sir Roderick Kaufman. He also went on the Crusades—as a spy, of course.”
In 1957, deploring the way musical comedies had grown serious and tearful, Kaufman wrote in The New York Times Magazine: “A funny thing happened to a musical comedy on its way to the theater the other night. It met a joke. Then, before it realized the audacity of such behavior, it took it along to the theater, and presently there it was in the show.”
Serving as director for one of George Oppenheimer’s plays, Kaufman suggested a line for a character who was to say he’d never been to Boston: “I went through once but it was closed.”
After a game of stud poker at a Thanatopsis session Kaufman raked in his $1,900 winnings and presented a dirge for all winners: “Check and rubber check.”
Asked once what he thought of the comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Kaufman remarked: “Martin and Lewis is a very funny fellow.”
On the radio show “Information, Please” George Kaufman, serving as a panelist, failed to answer a single question during the “warm-up” period. Just before broadcast time Clifton Fadiman, the show’s monitor, said jokingly to Kaufman, “May I ask what you have been doing for the past fifteen minutes?”
Kaufman answered: “You may. I’ve been listening to Information, Please.’”
Punning was one of the more popular verbal amusements’ with the Round Table group, and G.S.K. was a decided master. Two of the most famous Kaufman puns, reportedly delivered at Thanatopsis sessions, were:
“1 fold my tens like the Arabs, and as silently steal away.”
“One man’s Mede is another man’s Persian.”
Although Woollcott claimed it was originally his, one of the classic puns attributed to Kaufman dealt with “a cat hospital where they charged $4 a weak purr.”
One day at the Round Table, Aleck Woollcott made a remark which George Kaufman felt derided his Jewish ancestry. After defining his position to Woollcott, G.S.K. got up from his seat and said, “I am now walking away from this table, out of the dining room, and out of this hotel,” Then, surveying the group, he spotted Dorothy Parker—who was of both Jewish and Gentile parentage—and added, “And I hope that Mrs. Parker will walk out with me—half way.”
Writing for John Crosby’s column, Kaufman told the following story: “The effectiveness of radio commercials is debated this way and that, but one young matron of my acquaintance can testify that they make quite an impression. The lady in question was anxious to send her ten-year-old daughter to a summer camp, and was duly filling out a questionnaire. Religion? it asked, and she was about to write Presbyterian when the radio went into a commercial So she wrote Pepsodent instead. The child was turned down—apparently they didn’t want any Pepsodents at that camp. Felt there might be trouble.”
One Thanksgiving holiday, the Kaufmans, the Sher-woods, the Rosses, the Herbert Bayard Swopes, the Heywood Brouns, Peggy Pulitzer, Oscar Levant, and others all gathered at the Averell Harrimans. During dinner someone remarked, “What a play this gathering would make!” To which Kaufman agreed, adding that an appropriate title might be ‘The Upper Depths.”
G.S.K. once suggested his own epitaph: “Over my dead bodyr
Ring Lardner
RING LARDNER [1885–1933] began his literary career as a sports writer, rising to the authorship of a humorous sporting column in the Chicago Tribune, “Letters of a Bush-League Ball Player” earned him an early reputation as a humorist, and he soon turned from journalism to writing short stories, collections of which have been published in various editions (e.g., You Know Me, Al, How to Write Short Stories, Shut Up! He Explained). Considered by many to be one of the foremost masters of the American short story, Lardner was particularly adept at handling Western rural dialect. His comic style grew out of the Mark Twain tradition of folk humor-simplified, unassuming, tinged with a strain of bitterness and despair. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lardner was “a proud, shy, solemn, shrewd, polite, brave, kind, merciful, honorable man [who] made no enemies . . . and to many millions . . . gave release,” Never a willing conversationalist, Lardner often remained silent in public, springing forth with well-timed dry or witty remarks when and if the spirit moved him.
Ring once sent the following telegram to a friend who was away vacationing: “WHEN ARE YOU COMING BACK AND WHY?”
Before turning successfully to journalism, Lardner held a variety of jobs, including a brief stint with a firm that collected “bad debts.” He later observed, commenting on that phrase, “I never heard of
a good debt.”
Lardner was amused by Henry Ford’s famous comment on John D. Rockefeller, “I saw John D. Rockefeller but once. But when I saw that face I knew what made Standard Oil” Lardner himself once observed, “[I] also have seen John D. only once and that was on the golf course at Ormond, too far from him to get a look at his face, but the instant I beheld that stance I knew what made divots.”
“Last night President Harding and I attended The Merry Widow, but not together.”
In an autobiographical spoof, Ring tried his hand at some vaudevillian dialogue:
“One of the traits or characteristics for which [1] have been noted in recent years is dignity, -self-possession. Only the other day I was complimented on this by no less a personage than Mr. Charles M. Schwab.
“ ‘Lardy,’ he said in his enchanting Southern- drawl, ‘you certainly have a lot of poise/
“ Yes,’ I replied lightly. Three are at home and one is away at school.’”
Ring once referred to his prep-school-aged sons as his “four grandsons,” explaining to a puzzled acquaintance that they cost him “Four grand a year.”
Ring frequently recalled the story of an ex-coroner in St. Paul who wrote an ode to his mother that included this line: “If by perchance the inevitable should come.”
President Coolidge’s inimitable deadpan personality became a cherished target for the Round Tablers’ wit. After his first meeting with Coolidge, Lardner reported to the group that he had told the President a humorous anecdote, adding, “He laughed until you could hear a pin drop.”
On a certain baseball player: “Although he is a bad fielder he is also a poor hitter.”
Invited to a poker game by Heywood Broun, Lardner said over the telephone, “I can’t make it tonight, Heywood, it’s my little son’s night out and I’ve got to stay home with the nurse.”
“You know you’ve had a few too many when you come home and find cold scrambled eggs on top of last night’s lamb chops.”
Lardner was a master of American slang and colloquialism. He once wrote, “ ‘Never will’ and ‘won’t never’ are American. ‘Never won’t’ ain’t.”
Lardner once visited Paducah to interview Irvin Cobb, later reporting, “Mr. Cobb took me into his library and showed me his books, of which he has a complete set.”
ON WIVES:1
‘They are people whose watch is always a ¼ hr. off either one way or the other. But they wouldn’t have no idear what time it was anyway as this daylight savings gets them all balled up.”
“They are people that think when the telephone bell rings it is against the law not to answer it.”
“They are people who you get invited out somewheres with them and you ask them if they think you ought to shave and they say no, you look all right. But when you get to wherever you are going they ask everybody to please forgive Lute as he didn’t have time to shave.”
“Wives is people that asks you what time the 12:55 trains gets to New York. ‘At 1:37,’ you tell them. ‘How do you know?’ they ask.”
“A man defending husbands vs. wives, or men vs. women, has got about as much chance as a traffic policeman trying to stop a mad dog by blowing two whistles.”
Humorous stories about a baseball rookie, Yon Know Me, Al, brought Lardner early fame as a writer. So many readers asked him to name the player on whom his caricature was based that he added a footnote to subsequent editions: “The original of Jack Keefe is not a ball player at all, but Jane Addams of Hull House, a former Follies girl.”
One evening at the Friars Club a fellow member asked Lardner to read aloud a poem written by the member’s brother, twenty years dead. After he finished, Ring asked, “Did he write it before or after he died?”
“Frenchmen drink wine just like we used to drink water before Prohibition.”
“They ain’t no man or woman living that can pick up all their soup from a fiat lie using only a spoon and the result is that from 1/10 to a 1/2 an inch is always left laying in the bottom of the dish which is plane waste as the most economical Jap in the world cannot do nothing with left over soup only throw it in the ash can.”2
Never a supporter of Prohibition, Lardner waged a series of his own antidrinking campaigns, like the following: “If the penalty for selling honest old beer to minors was $100 fine, why 2 to 14 years in a meat grinder would be mild for a guy that sells “white pop” on the theory that it is a drink.”
Lardner once played a round of golf with President Warren Harding. In the clubhouse afterward, the President, who said he had enjoyed the round thoroughly, asked Ring, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Yes,” Ring answered. “I want to be ambassador to Greece”
“Why do you want to go there?” the President asked.
“Because my wife has grown tired of Great Neck.”
Discussing the circumstances under which he composed one of his early books, Ring commented:
“The contents of The Big Town were written mostly in a furnished house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the author wishes to thank the rats for staying out of the room while he worked. It was wintertime and the furnished house was a summer cottage, but we didn’t realize that when we rented it. Nor, apparently, did the rats.”3
In the words of Harold Ross: “I asked Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.”
ON HORSES: “Defenders of le Horse will no doubt point to the term ‘good, common horse sense,’ or the simile ‘work like a horse,’ as being proof of the beast’s virtues, but if a horse has got such good common sense, why do they always have to have a jockey show them the way around a fenced in race track where you couldn’t possible go wrong unlest you was dumb ... as for working like a horse, I never met a horse who worked because he thought it was funny. They work for the same reason the rest of us works.”4
“He gave her a look that you could have poured on a waffle.”
“If he got stewed and fell in the gutter he’d catch a fish.”
“Well I happened to be sitting in a card game the other night with 5 others of whom 2 besides myself was gents and at first I kept wondering to myself why was it I felt so happy as I am generally always miserable in a card game on acct. of not having no luck. Well my luck wasn’t no better than usual so I had to look for another reason and it finely come to me like a flash. The other 2 gents in the game was also losing their hair.”5
While June Moon (which Ring wrote in collaboration with Kaufman) was having its tryout in Atlantic City, the critics there opined that the play had a great second act, but that the first and third acts needed rewriting. Strolling the boardwalk one day Ring met a friend, who asked “What are you doing here?”
“I’m down here with an act,” Ring answered.
At a Thanatopsis session, Aleck Woollcott got into an argument with a visiting player over past military experiences. Aleck, at his nastiest, grew increasingly sarcastic with the other, an ex-infantryman. Finally the visitor shouted at Woollcott, “At least I’m not a writing soldier!”
Addressing the visitor, Lardner then made what was said to be his only remark of the evening: “You sure swept the table that time.”
Seated at the bar in a theater district nightclub, Ring was approached by an ostentatious actor-type with a wild, flowing mane. Lardner asked the man, “How do you look when I’m sober?”
Lardner once told a group of fellow writers of a note he had penned to Santa Claus: “Please bring this little Lardner boy a waste basket and don’t attach a card saying you hope he will make use of it.”
Ask by Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield to list qualifications for the ideal woman, Lardner composed the following set of specifications:
1. Lockjaw
2. Hereditary obesity
3. Shortness of breath
4. Falling arches
5. Mechanical engineering
; 6. Draftsmanship
7. Absolutely fireproof
8. Day and night elevator service
9. Laundry sent out before 8:30 a.m. will be returned the same day.
10. Please report to the management any incivility on part of employees.
In the hospital just before he died, Lardner wrote a parody of O. O. Mclntyre’s famous gossip column. Affecting the pseudo-casual tone of the name-dropping columnist, Ring let his thoughts and opinions ramble on, seemingly at will:
“Thoughts while strolling: Damon Runyon’s feet. Kate Smith, a small-town girl who became nationwide in a big city. Rosamund Pinchot and Theodore Dreiser could pass for twins. Rube Goldberg never wears a hat to bed. There is a striking resemblance between Damon Runyon’s feet and Ethel Merman. . . .”
ADVICE TO MARRIED COUPLES: “Both partys should try and talk about subjects that the other is interested in. They ain’t no husband cares a damn if the wash woman that is comeing next wk. goes to a different church than the one that was here last wk. and they’s very few wifes cares the same amt. whether Max Baer is going to be the next heavyweight champion, so the idear is that when supper is over and the loveing pair sets down in the liveing room to wait till its polite to go to bed, the husband should ought to insist that they won’t be no conversation unlest its about the wash woman and the wife should ought to insist that they won’t be no conversation unless its about the next heavyweight champ, and if the both of them insist hard enough they won’t be no conversation at all which boarders on the ideal”6
Bon Mots, Wisecracks, and Gags Page 5
