The Nation's Pulse/To Asa Hearthrug, with Appreciation
Gold, Victor
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL TO ASA HEARTHRUG, WITH APPRECIATION by Victor Gold M ax Shulman is dead. He was the King of College Humor in his undergraduate day (which was my undergraduate day), the...
...She murdered her husband...
...Shulman is remembered for The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which made him Hollywood-rich, and some may remember him for Rally Round the Flag, Boys, a suburban comedy that made him Hollywood-richer...
...I go to Felbgung's market and I ask Felbgung to cut me a few steaks or chops...
...Zebra Derby, his second book featuring the wide-eyed shlemiel, Asa Hearthrug, was written at a time when Fred Waring's band was flogging the airwaves with "Meadow-land" a.k.a...
...Twenty-nine children...
...He should live so long...
...He cuts them for me and then I open my purse and give a look at my ration book and I say, 'Well, well...
...The letter went off, thanking him for the compliment, and he wrote back, saying it was a funny piece, all right...
...Now you listen to me a minute...
...And yet, I wondered .. . Then, en route to the courthouse one hot summer afternoon in 1955, I passed a bookstore with a window display of Shulman's latest, an anthology titled Max Shulman's Guided Tour of Campus Humor (The Best Stories, Articles, Jokes, Songs and Nonsense from Fifty Years of College Humor Magazines...
...The Song of the Red Army," while Hollywood was grinding out pro-Soviet pap like Mission to Moscow...
...I haven't got enough points.' What's Felbgung going to do, paste the steaks back on the beef...
...SORRY WE CAN'T USE IT, BUT LET US SEE MORE (Playboy...
...The deed search could wait...
...Or rather, confirmed what I'd suspected all along but hadn't known for sure until Shulman goosed my psyche: I wasn't, by God, put down here for deed searches...
...Four shots ripped into my groin, and I was off on the biggest adventure of my life • • • Sleep till Noon (1950) That, children, was Max Shulman...
...An American institution, Asa, built by Americans to educate American youth in the American way of life...
...The Feather Merchants (1944) N o East Coast editors having passed through either the campus of Tulane or the Student Union building of the University of Alabama, my own hacking days as a humor writ-er ended on graduation from law school in 1951...
...Bye-bye, American pie...
...He was an equal-opportunity cynic who, at the turn of a page, could unload on more traditional undergraduate icons...
...Asa...
...And now he's dead...
...Which, of course, changed my equation completely...
...Barefoot Boy with Cheek (1943) The story on young Shulman—the one that made him the envy of every college humor writer of his era—was that he was hacking away for the University of Minnesota magazine SkiU-Mah when, one lucky day, a senior editor from New York City passed through campus and asked whether he'd like to try his hand at a funnynovel...
...C o it was that when the subject 1...
...I exclaimed "Where is she now...
...And why...
...They want to destroy because they are warped, bitter, unhappy...
...The people you were with tonight...
...I went back to the office...
...You must choose now which direction you will follow...
...played ideological favorites...
...And why are they warped, bitter, unhappy...
...Bang...
...Oh, I know, they tell you they want to liberate the working class and all the rest of their filthy Red lies, but that isn't the reason...
...Mama," I said, "where are you getting all this food...
...But Dobie Gillis is to Max Shulman what Captain Queeg was to Humphrey Bogart...
...Oh, yes, said the third (an English lit student, majoring in television credits), Max Shulman...
...WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN LAW...
...March triumphantly up the people's way into the sun," I said promptly...
...He was the King of College Humor in his undergraduate day (which was my undergraduate day), the most-quoted contemporary writer on the American campus of the late 1940s and fifties...
...The Royal Portable came down from the attic...
...Dogma, cant, hypocrisy—all grist for bourgeois, counter-revolutionary satire on the American campus of the 1940s...
...Dobie Gillis, right...
...And that settled that...
...They weren't as funny...
...Bang...
...There it is...
...Bang...
...The Royal Portable was packed away, the shingle went up, a client came walking through the door, and there was no looking back...
...Bang...
...That is Popula Shopishnok, winner of the Soviet Union fertility medal...
...Never mind that he wasn't as deep as Faulkner, Mailer, Toynbee, or Eliot...
...Max is Asa Hearthrug and belly laughs, not the bland Dobie Gillis, re-runs or no re-runs...
...Will you travel the snare-lined path of capitalism that leads to the abyss, or will you march triumphantly up the people's way into the sun...
...Three months later I owned my first personal rejection slip, hand-written by Ken Russell .. . A PRETTY FUNNY BIT...
...Who is that woman whose picture is on the photo-mural...
...Bogie is Spade and Rick, not Queeg or that stubbled wretch in The African Queen, Oscar or no Oscar...
...Of course, comrade...
...Mnd who wants to destroy this American way of life...
...Not the Bogie, not the Max we, the generation of the forties, remember most fondly...
...There is just one question I would like to ask...
...He paused thirty seconds for emphasis...
...Mama, when you do things like that you're helping the enemy" "I'm helping the enemy...
...Thurber, Heywood Broun, H. Allen Smith, Max himself—and there, on page 317, taking up nearly a full page, my bit on Chiang Kai-shek trying out for football at Notre Dame...
...The University of Minnesota, calm, strong, peaceful...
...Shulman, with his manic, broadsword style, would be the comic voice of a new generation...
...Asa, humanity is at the crossroads...
...Look at it, Asa...
...One month later I owned my first rejection slip (New Yorker, naturally...
...Doesn't your father buy a war bond every week and we don't cash them in for three months...
...A very funny writer in a very special time...
...Points, shmoints," she said lightly...
...When a small voice inside asks the question, you muffle it...
...The artist is recognizable, the craft is there, but it's not the real thing...
...Because they can't get into a fraternity...
...Siberia...
...Come over here by the window" His tone grew softer...
...She is the mother of twenty-nine children...
...Not that Shulman, whatever his left-wing critics said, Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...Right, but wrong...
...came up at the breakfast table 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 one Sunday morning in the late sixties —which writer, of all writers, had most influenced my life?—I said Max Shulman, and two out of three of my kids said, who...
...I'll tell you why...
...And then, an afterthought at the bottom of the page, in his own hand: P.S...
...Don't they use ration points in Minneapolis...
...Roger interrupted harshly...
...The Zebra Derby (1944) On second thought, maybe Shulman wasn't all that shallow...
...A call to the publisher to find out where I could write Shulman: he was living in Westport, Connecticut...
...What do you know...
...Thurber, Benchley, Perelman—the rapier wits of the thirties—had their audience, but there was room for new talent...
...Didn't I give my only son to the service...
...So what was it young Max, then in his early twenties, perceived in our noble Russian allies that somehow escaped his elders...
...Proud to have you, comrade," said Yetta...
...The editor was Doubleday's Ken McCormick, who foresaw a vast, untapped market for humor in the booming college population of the forties...
...But when Max Shulman picks up the chorus, who shuts his ears to karma calling...
Vol. 21 • November 1988 • No. 11
