Not Exactly What I Had in Mind (20 page)

What he did say was, “You come back and see us now.”

As I left the field house, a voice in my mind started spluttering, “
What?
That ain’t the way to do a damn interview. That is a mean man back there. He has been known to hang out with Frank Sinatra and Spiro Agnew. You going to let him get away with all that crap about wishing he knew grammar and about English being more important than football?”

“Yeah,” I told the voice. “I am. I think he’s right.”

“O
F THE THREE TYPES
of convulsion,” according to some notes I took years ago from a report on a conference on Cybernetics and Humor, “laughter is the one for which there is the clearest ideational content.”

Aren’t there more types of convulsion than that? Sneeze, Paroxysm, Orgasm, Upchuck, and Heart Attack spring to mind. If I were writing an allegory in which the Bland Knight manages to pass through the Vale of Convulsion with his guide, the sorely pressed Equanimity, those would all be characters. I can see Sneeze and Upchuck now. And how about Hiccup?

Another note from that cybernetics report: “There are two types of tickling.” Left-handed and right-handed? Sweet and mean? Literal and figurative? Ribs and feet? All we may say for certain is, it is hard to discuss Humor without seeming a fool.

Hence, books of Humor receive little serious critical attention. There may well be thousands of close readers who would agree with me that Bruce Jay Friedman’s
Lonely Guy’s Book of Life,
for example, is a much better book, line for line and in toto, than many a bloated, enervating major comic novel such as John Barth’s
Giles Goat-Boy
or John Irving’s
World According to Carp.
But no one ever says so in print.

However, if there is anything less dignified than setting up as a humorist, it is setting up as a humorist who is not taken seriously enough. A funny writer probably ought just to be laughed at, at least until old age, when he or she deserves to be genuinely nasty and revered.

Mordecai Richler, a truly funny writer but one who has had the wisdom to become a serious novelist, has collected
The Best of Modern Humor.
His sole criterion for the material he chose, he says in his introduction, was that “it had to make me laugh.” That is hard to argue with. But somebody’s got to do it.

First, however, I will declare my interest. I am one of the sixty-four writers anthologized, and I am also mentioned favorably in the introduction (to avoid any conflict, please skip over that passage, which is on page xvii, toward the bottom). As a lad, I read anthologies and figured that, if I could myself reach the point of being anthologized, I would be set. In my near-maturity I find that an anthologee’s lot is not glorious. He is liable, browsing in a bookstore all innocently, to stumble upon himself in
Trees: A Golden Treasury of the Best Arboreal Writing of the Ages.
Never is there a prepublication card in the mail proclaiming, “Congratulations! You are hereby one of the great tree writers of all time.” Since
The Best of Modern Humor
reached the stores, I have spoken to four of the writers appearing in it. Two of them were unaware that there was such a book. I gather that all I am ever going to see out of the deal, financially, is $67.50.

When my high-school classmates were tearing apart ’51 Fords and inserting new cams and mufflers, I was getting just as greasy reading
A Subtreasury of American Humor,
edited by E. B. and Katherine S. White. That book appeared in 1941, the year of my birth. This new collection is the most definitive-looking roundup of literary American humor since, and it also embraces various top-notch Brits and V. S. Naipaul. Here are heroes of my adolescence — Robert Benchley, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, H. L. Mencken, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Ring Lardner, and so on. Here too are at least seven contemporaries of mine with whom I have had too much to drink. I always wanted to be on a mythical all-star team.

And now that I am on one — these should have been Neil Armstrong’s first words on the moon — it is not exactly what I had in mind. This book has a great deal of wonderful stuff in it, including Mencken on cops, Liebling on Earl Long, John Mortimer on schooldays, Eudora Welty on family life, Thomas Meehan on introducing Yma to Oona, Veronica Geng’s “My Mao,” Woody Allen on one man’s Emma Bovary, and J. B. Morton’s grandly ineffable “Intrusions of Captain Foulenough.”

But Flann O’Brien, who may have been the funniest writer ever, is inadequately represented by some of his Keats and Chapman gags, one of which I don’t get. I’d rather have had something from Peter De Vries and Kenneth Tynan other than their respective Faulkner parodies. (Trying to send up Faulkner is like trying to do an impression of Little Richard. You had better be able to cut loose.) Richler’s Thurber selection is a pale one. And I have never cared much for Frank Sullivan’s “Cliché Expert” pieces. I prefer the Whites’ choice from Sullivan, “Gloria Swanson Defends Her Title,” which has a magnetic hat in it; I am a sucker for anything with a magnetic hat.

At the time of the Whites’ anthology, it was pretty clear what Humor was in this country. It was funny writing that had come out in the
New Yorker
or that people assumed had come out in the
New Yorker.
Parodies, sketches, personal essays, short stories, reporting, verse. For the prose, the
New Yorker
had and still has an infelicitous but suggestive term, “the casual.” Implied is a straight-faced, graceful, deftly self-conscious flouting of rigidities and … oh God, I’ve got to get out of this kind of thing. There are two types of exit from this kind of thing, and that is one of them.

The other is to invoke the White House. We are seeing a resurgence of Humor in this country, as in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. My theory is that Humor flourishes in times of chipper but ill-advised composure.

In high school I decided that writing Humor was my vocation. I assumed there would be a good living in it. When I got out of college in 1963, however, there was not. This was partly because I was not as good at Humor as I had been in high school and partly because of the historical moment. Humor is counterrevolutionary. So are the great majority of revolutions, within a few months, but that was not a point that seemed called for in the sixties. In the sixties we had the Theater of the Absurd and Black Humor, neither of which was funny.

J. D. Salinger and Donald Barthelme had borne the
New Yorker
tradition of Humor off into, respectively, mysticism (or New Hampshire) and experimental fiction. Humor collections were scarce, pale, and ill-selling. Magazines kept saying they were always on the lookout for good Humor pieces, but rarely did they, the
New Yorker
included, find any.

Big shifts had to occur. I recall the lurid — no, the wholesome — exhilaration I felt on seeing the advance excerpt from
Portnoy’s Complaint
in
Partisan Review.
Philip Roth had done what Zooey couldn’t. He had brought explicit sex into Humor. It was about time. Humor as represented by the
Subtreasury
had always bordered on the prudish — had indeed (see Thurber) derived much of its energy from sexuality abashed and redirected. That did not work anymore.

Another thing that struck me as pivotal was the deep structural drollery of Norman Mailer’s referring to himself as “Mailer” and as a “radical conservative” in
Armies of the Night:
Mailer the Committed was not right-thinking but loopy, recombinant and foxy. But although Mailer, like Kafka, has complained that readers miss his jokes, Humor was not his line. And Roth was not writing Humor pieces.

I did not begin to feel that Humor piecework was coming back as an occupational possibility until Nora Ephron’s
Esquire
columns on women were collected as
Crazy Salad,
a best-seller. In one of those columns Ephron said she had grown up wanting to be Dorothy Parker and to write for the
New Yorker,
but she had gotten over both those ambitions. In the process, however, she had resolved matters of modern womanhood on the level of Humor. This was no small step for mankind.

Then, in
Rolling Stone,
Hunter S. Thompson took drugs out of the realm of stuporous religiosity and into Humor of a hellacious, wolverine-ridden kind. Along the way, at some cost to his cogency, he did American culture the service of running controlled substances into the ground.

Meanwhile Humor reached out in many directions. Woody Allen brought in Freud; Wilfrid Sheed actually wrote funny literary criticism; Fran Lebowitz put starch into Camp; Garrison Keillor blended the spirits of E. B. White and Saint Francis of Assisi; Calvin Trillin found merriment in food, demography, and leftism.

The Best of Modern Humor
reflects this opening up and renewal of the old
Subtreasury
tradition. All the writers I have mentioned, except for Mailer and (regrettably) Hunter Thompson, are represented. The aforementioned
Portnoy
excerpt is included; and Ephron’s robust piece on being flat-chested; and Trillin’s savory column on the de la Rentas’ salon, in which he refers to himself as “Calvin of the Trillin” (Mark Twain claimed to have served in the Confederate army with a man who spelled his name d’un’Lap). The selection by Mr. Keillor (“Shy Rights: Why Not Pretty Soon?”) is less rich than such spookily moving pieces of his as “Drowning 1954” and “After a Fall,” but shyness has a deep significance in the tradition of Benchley, Thurber, and White; and Keillor, in all due modesty, has faced shyness down.

Whether feverish or laid-back, Humor springs from a certain desperation, which uses jujitsu on looming fear and shame, flirts almost pruriently yet coolly with madness and sentimentality, and fuses horse sense with dream logic. Asked about what it takes to write jokes, Woody Allen once replied, “That leap. I’m scared of dead patches.”

Richler is a venturesome anthologist, and it is interesting that he found Humor in Naipaul, Saul Bellow, and Truman Capote. But how come Max Beerbohm isn’t in this book? It is easy to carp about omissions from any anthology, and laughter is a personal matter. But Beerbohm knew laughter inside out. In an essay called “Laughter,” Beerbohm recalled, from Boswell, the time that Dr. Johnson broke up over a will written by a Mr. Chambers:

“Certainly there is nothing ridiculous in the fact of a man making a will. But this is the measure of Johnson’s achievement. He had created gloriously much out of nothing at all. There he sat, old and ailing and unencouraged by the company, but soaring higher and higher in absurdity, more and more rejoicing, and still soaring and rejoicing after he had gone out into the night.”

*
In 1972, Kent Hannon, then of
Sports Illustrated,
interviewed Coach Bryant in his office and noticed on the bookshelf a copy of
Portnoy’s Complaint.
Asked whether he had been reading such a book, the Bear denied any knowledge of what it contained or how it got there. I have never known what to make of this. Did he use it in preparing hygiene lectures for his boys?

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-three books. The first,
About Three Bricks Shy of a Load
, was expanded into
About Three Bricks Shy … and the Load Filled Up
. It is often called one of the best sports books of all time. His subsequent works have taken on a range of subjects, from
Duck Soup
, to Robert E. Lee, to what cats are thinking, to how to savor New Orleans, to what it’s like being married to the first woman president of the United States.

Blount is a panelist on NPR’s
Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!
, an ex-president of the Authors Guild, a usage consultant for the
American Heritage Dictionary
, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and a member of both the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the band the Rock Bottom Remainders.

In 2009, Blount received the University of North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe Prize. The university cited “his voracious appetite for the way words sound and for what they really mean.”
Time
places Blount “in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H. L. Mencken and W. C. Fields.” Norman Mailer has said, “Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I’ve read in a long time.” Garrison Keillor told the
Paris Review
, “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence.”

Blount’s essays, articles, stories, and verses have appeared in over one hundred and fifty publications, including the
New Yorker
, the
New York Times
,
Esquire
, the
Atlantic
,
Sports Illustrated
, the
Oxford American
, and
Garden & Gun
. He comes from Decatur, Georgia, and lives in western Massachusetts.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Many of these pieces have previously appeared in the following publications:
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Atlantic, Boston University Journal, Columbia Journalism Review (
“The In-House Effect,” September/October 1980; “Weekly News Quiz,” September/October 1979),
Cosmopolitan Country Journal, Eastern Airlines Pastimes, Esquire, Harvard Magazine, Inside Sports, More, New Satirist, New West, The New Yorker (
“Whose Who?,” “That Dog Isn’t Fifteen,” “Notes from the Edge Conference,” “For the Record”),
Organic Gardening, Oui, Playboy, Soho News, Sports Illustrated.
“One Pig Jumped” and “Merely Shot in the Head” copyright © The New York Times Company, 1978, 1980; reprinted by permission.

Excerpt from
The True Confession of George Barker
reprinted by permission of New American Library; copyright © George Barker, 1964. “The Bourgeois Blues,” words and music by Huddie Ledbetter, edited with new material by Alan Lomax, reprinted by permission; TRO copyright © Folkways Music Publishers, Inc., 1959.

Copyright © 1967, 1968, 1970, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Roy Blount Jr.