American Humor
A REVIEWER of what the blurbs call " hilariously funny " books has to be careful with his liver and lights, or, as Harold Nicolson
puts it, level of consciousness. My level varies like, and probably
with, English weather, and it isn't fair to my authors to expose myself to their hilirities- while I'm gruhting in a trough of, low
pressure, especially when they are American. The classics of humorous literature will, I admit, weather any climatic vagary, and perhaps no humour is conscientiously reviewed along, if you follow me, a hepatic isobar. But a Zuleika Dobson, say, or an Alice can stand on her own pretty feet in any climate without being blurbed as " hilariously funny."
The first trouble with the Humor School of American writers is that they must, it seems, dig their readers in .the ribs and say: " Laugh, Bud ! That's Humor ! " And the second, which is their monopoly, is the Corn Belt Family.Album. I suspect that the shiny
magazine has to answer most for this, with its tempting rate of pay, its habit of classifying its material by sections into "Travel:" " Romance," " The Movies," " Humor," &c., and its apparent belief that all Americans either have been, or would like to have been, " born and raised " in Columbus, Ohio, or Muncie, Indiana.
Mr. S. J. Perelman with his A Child's Garden of Cuises digs me hard in the ribs from every page. There are American degrees in most things, and I shouldn't be surprised to know that Mr. Perelman was a professor with the degree, M.Tech.Hum. ; and, to judge by the energy and vitality of his humour, that he coaches a -team on the campus. He knows all the Vicki. Even in the preliminary " calistheoics " of a single piece he can slip in. a beaut of a paraprosdokian, a sizzling inverted archaism, two lovely decliches and a deliberate bathos to make you wriggle on your bleachers. But only when your "level of consciousness " is below par. Mine was about 55 per cent, when I first tried A Child's Garden. I saw it all coming. I knew the signals. I couldn't raise so much as an unexclamatory ha.
" Unfair to Perelman ! " shouted my conscience. So I put him in
my cricket bag 'fait village' away " match against a brewery.
Between the not infrequent stops on our round-about journey home I managed with no strain at all to rock the cherribang with my hilarity. This sort of thing (on Hollywood technical experts):
" I knew a White Russian artillery officer at M.G.M., imported at bloodcurdling expense from Algeria as adviser on a romance of the Foreign Legion, who languished for two years in an oubliette under tilt Music Department,. Over the noon yoghurt, his voice trembled as he spoke of his yearning to -eturn to Russia,. where they were, waiting to shoot him, but the director of Blistered Bugles' felt him indisPensable.- At last he departed, with close to 40,000 rutabagas in his money belt, a broken man. His sole con- tribution was that he had succeeded in having 'pouf altered to sacre bloo.1" ,
Emily Kimbrough. was " born and raised " in Muncie, Indiana, the genuine corn-fed article. When she was eleven, she and her brother went with their parents to live in Chicago. Hand in Hand describes the often painful and occasionally amusing attempts of them both to change from being " Hoosier Hayseeds " into being cultured Chicagoans:, It is a very family, very feminine, album. " Mother," " Father" or "Brother " is mentioned on an average about two and a half times per paragraph throughout. Many pages carry a liberal pasting of Grandmother " and " Grandfather " (Uncle Abner, I'm thankful to say, absent. Too busy with the hogs back home in Muncie 7). As a narrative for English consumption it is slow and trivially esoteric.
Cornelia Otis Skinner is an old favourite of mine, and when, in Nuts in May she opens her family album, find it easy to forgive her. Fortunately, the centre-piece of hers is her son, about whoin she can be, albeit affectionately, objective and irreverent. " Father" and " Mother " figure but briefly, and the Corn Belt only for-a healthy snigger or two. I won't say Miss Skinner ,writes much better than the °tip% Some of her pieces are dull. But the last three, and in partictilir the-last on how she came to be interviewed by the great Dr. Kinsey, are very funny indeed—from any level,
Previous page
