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December 03, 2006
Reading assignment
The Wall Street Journal periodically posts suggested reading on a variety of topics; last week's focused on classic American humor.
Of the five, I haven't read these three -- although I am familiar with the authors, Thurber primarily for his late-career cartoons, and Lardner more for his son, who penned the screenplay for the film version of M*A*S*H; I may have to give them a read.
1. "You Know Me Al" by Ring Lardner (Scribner's, 1916).
Ring Lardner thought of himself as primarily a sports columnist whose stuff wasn't destined to last, and he held to that absurd belief even after his first masterpiece, "You Know Me Al," was published in 1916 and earned the awed appreciation of Virginia Woolf, among other very serious, unfunny people.
Ostensibly a collection of letters to a friend back home in Bedford, Ind., it traces the first season of a rookie hurler for the Chicago White Sox. Jack Keefe is at once cocky and guileless, suspicious and gullible, innocent and--you get hints of this along the way--doomed. But really, really funny.
2. "My Life and Hard Times" by James Thurber (Harper, 1933).
"The clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus." This is easily the most beautiful sentence ever written about what is now the largest city in Ohio, and Thurber, alone among the Buckeyes, was the one who was destined to write it.
Thurber's tossed-off cartoons ("Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?") seem to be wearing better than his painstaking prose, at least among highbrow critics. But this brief memoir of growing up in an eccentric family in Columbus before and during World War I is nearly perfect--and still the funniest and most accessible Thurber.
[...]
4. "Westward Ha!" by S.J. Perelman (Simon & Schuster, 1948).
Seventy years ago "nonsense" was an honored subclass of American humor, heavy on pointless paradox and wordplay for its own sake. The closest thing to nonsense that's worth reading today: the short pieces of S.J. Perelman, onetime scriptwriter for the Marx Brothers.
His work can seem bloodless and slight--he created nothing as heartfelt as Jack Keefe or as charming as Thurber's Columbus--but for sheer verbal virtuosity, for his dizzy manipulation of language, Perelman deserves a place at the top of the trade.
"Westward Ha!" is an account of a trip to the Far East ("The whole business began with an unfavorable astrological conjunction, Virgo being in the house of Alcohol"). As a travel book it is more closely tethered to reality than most Perelman stuff and thus easier to enjoy. The witty illustrations by his friend Al Hirschfeld are lagniappe.
In case you were wondering about that last sentence (I know I was!):
la·gniappe
NOUN: Chiefly Southern Louisiana & Mississippi 1. A small gift presented by a storeowner to a customer with the customer's purchase. 2. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit.
I hope the books are less ... pretentious in their writing than the recommendation, which would be an unexpected gift, indeed.
Lagniappe.
Sheesh.
Posted by Mike Lief at December 3, 2006 10:09 PM
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Comments
Sir, given your recommended reading materials, you obviously have a GREAT DEAL OF TIME ON YOUR HANDS.
Posted by: Mark at December 4, 2006 08:04 PM
Hmm, three books doesn't seem excessive; all it takes is a rainy weekend to make substantial headway, and reading is never a chore.
Posted by: Mike Lief at December 4, 2006 08:16 PM