A Jester's Companion
ARMOUR, RICHARD
A Jester's Companion An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor. Reviewed by Richard Armour Ed. by Bennett Cerf. Professor of English, Scripps College; Modern Library. 688 pp. $2.95. author, "It...
...It is good that Bennett Cerf, amidst all his other activities, collects it for us and presents it in such a pleasant package...
...and "Beyond the Twelve-Mile Limit...
...A novelty in this collection is the arrangement of humor writers by regions: New England, New York, the Southland, the Midwest, the Southwest, and the Far West, Cerf believes that much of our contemporary humor centers in New York City, though he notes the rapid rise of the Deep South...
...Certainly it was an easier period in which to write humor, with tensions and suspicions less inhibiting than today...
...This was the era of the old Life magazine, of FPA's "The Conning Tower," of the best writing of Robert Benchley, Clarence Day, Dorothy Parker, Will Rogers, Margaret Fishback, Samuel Hoffen-stein, Ruth McKenney, and many another—all of them well represented in this collection...
...But any anthology, especially in the very personal field of humor, is likely to reveal the individual taste of the editor...
...As the editor points out in his foreword, this is the first compilation of the sort since the excellent Subtreasury of American Humor, edited by E. B. White and his wife, Katherine, in 1941...
...Of prose writers, S. J. Perelman pops up most often, as he should, and of the playful poets it is Ogden Nash who has the most entries...
...author, "It All Started With Columbus" Now that An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor, edited by Bennett Cerf and first published in 1954, has achieved the eminence and permanence of a Modern Library edition, it is appropriate to comment on this volume and on the state of American humor...
...Despite the newcomers, Cerf has included largely the old, or at least middle-aged, favorites, and chosen them freshly and well...
...It may be that American humor reached its height in the Twenties and Thirties, the period between the two World Wars...
...Bennett Cerf is not only indefatigable but generous...
...Admitting an aversion for early American humor which depended so much on bad spelling and faulty grammar for its effect, he has omitted humorists like Josh Billings and Petroleum V. Nasby, though the dialects of Arthur Kober and Milt Gross, and of Joel Chandler Harris and Roark Bradford, he finds funny (as does this reviewer) . One notable omission is Irvin S. Cobb, and readers will think of others...
...Broad as Bennett Cerf's taste is, ranging from Bret Harte to Wolcott Gibbs and from Mac Hyman to Dorothy Parker, he shows a special fondness for metropolitan, modern, fairly sophisticated humor...
...His collections of humor are always king size (this time a Giant), and the cost to the reader is kept to a fraction of a cent per page...
...Since it is a work in which the wheels of many authors go around rapidly, and since the editor is well known as a lover of puns, it is a wonder he did not call it A Velocipedia of Modern American Humor...
...First let it be said that we have here not an encyclopedia (i.e., "a work treating separately various topics from all branches of knowledge, usually in alphabetical arrangement" or "a work treating exhaustively one art or science") but an anthology...
...Not regionalized are his sections of scenes from Broadway comedy hits, pieces about childhood, parodies, and the first-rate selection of humorous verse...
...He has to strain a bit to put his writers in one region or another, and he has to devise such categories as "Anywhere, U.S.A...
...Anyhow, the contents are much lighter than the title, and the 688 pages give the book almost encyclopedic proportions...
...But humor is still very much alive, and let us be thankful...
...But, as Bennett Cerf's wide-ranging and highly readable anthology reveals, many able humor writers are still at work, and new ones are coming on...
...It may be a little discouraging that some of our best writers, like James Thurber, are getting along in years, and that others, like Dorothy Parker, are captives of Hollywood...
...Since then, as Cerf says, "a brand-new crop of first-class humorists has appeared to brighten our horizon," and he mentions Max Shulman, Russell Lynes, Cleveland Amory, H. Allen Smith and Art Buchwald among these...
...For humor is the foe of sentimentality, disproportion and self-importance, and the friend of reason, balance and humility...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 24
