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The Decline of
American Humor
“What, sir,” said Boswell, notebook in hand, “is the principal
virtue?” “Whereas, sir,” said Sam, “you know, courage is reckoned the
greatest of all virtues; because unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for
preserving any other.”
When Bob Hatch wrote and suggested we have a piece on the decline of American humor for
the Nation’s Spring Book Issue [1957], I said fine, we can use
Columbia’s new collection of Vance Randolph and somebody else’s selection of
Finley Peter Dunne as pegs to hang it on; few things are funnier and fewer things today
are anything like them. Unfortunately, the books never came, so this story will have to be
more general and sort of anticipatory.
I don’t know about the new selection of Mr. Dooley. Just recently I read some
professor who said he was an Irish dialect comedian, so, since this editor is probably a
professor too, it may be a pig in a poke. But there is no doubt about Vance Randolph. He
has never published a book that wasn’t thoroughly satisfying, and he has done some
five or six I know of: Who Blowed Up the Church House?, The Devil’s
Pretty Daughter, We Always Lie to Strangers, Ozark Superstitions,
all with Columbia, and Down in the Holler (with George P. Wilson), with the
University of Oklahoma Press. Get them all, and the new one, too. This isn’t TV
hillbilly humor, it isn’t even Al Capp or Erskine Caldwell. It is a last lingering
contact with an older and better world, a thin red umbilicus still attached to what
Sherwood Anderson would have called the American Earth. I am well aware that the reason
for the popularity of the cultural survivals of the Southern Highlands on the New York
stage is that barefoot girls and one-gallus, corncob-bearing males give the subway
Neanderthals somebody to look down on — no mean accomplishment. The real thing is
something else again. Vance Randolph is not a professor, but an uncorrupted
amateur folklorist. This is a great tradition, all the best folklore we have has been
collected by doctors (of medicine, not philosophy), clergymen, schoolmarms, and plain
people. There is something about the methodology of scholarship that blights folkspeech.
Everybody knows that the Southern Highlands are the last refuge of the American
frontier, and, from before our own, of the marches of England and Scotland and of the
Scots and North Irish. But there is more to the Ozarks than Toynbee’s “external
proletariat.” This is the home of the Green Corn Rebellion, the land where, in the
evenings, around the stove in the crossroads store, one literate farmer read aloud the
words of Oscar Ameringer and The Appeal to Reason, slowly and painfully, to the
leg-slapping approval of a tobacco-chewing audience. Here, if anywhere in America, was the
focus of a purely indigenous agrarian anarchist-socialism. I have run hounds, swapped
lies, and drunk tiger piss with men who would have been happy fighting with Makhno.
Unruly, utterly skeptical, absolutely fearless, bawdy free-thinkers — very different
indeed from the originals of the term “square” — the square-headed agrarian
Progressives of the northern Middlewest. These are the key words of great — classic
— epic — Homeric — humor. A sense of the consistent principle of
incongruity on which Nature, for all our science and philosophy, really operates. The
realization that the accepted, official version of anything is most likely false and that
all authority is based on fraud. The courage to face and act on these two conclusions. The
appreciation of the wonderful hilarity of the processes of human procreation and
elimination. The acceptance of the prime fact that nobody made it that way — it just
happened. I find it hard to bust into roars of laughter over the long-winded racket of the
majority of the old-time humorists Constance Rourke writes about. I am not a passionate
devotee of Sut Lovingood. But from those days to Mencken — or even Westbrook Pegler,
Damon Runyon, or Will Rogers at their best, these were the qualities that made American
humor American. It was just plain lack of style that made it, in so many cases, tedious.
This, once, was the blood and meat and bone of our very own life. Out of it came our
one epic hero, the only American who can walk with Ajax and Odysseus — Huck Finn.
What happened to this heritage? I’ll tell you what happened to it. Not long ago, in
the Vaticide Review, a college professor who, of all things, teaches the children
of cowboys in a university in the mountains of the Wild West, wrote a “paper”
conclusively demonstrating by patient, laborious research that Huckleberry Finn
was a homosexual romance. This came about, not because the professor was himself a
homosexual, but because he was moribund with the ultimate corruption of human
self-alienation. He just didn’t know what the word “work” meant. He had
never done any. He never knew anybody who had done any. Huckleberry Finn is our
example of one of the three or four basic epic plots — maybe there are really only
two. It is about the devoted comradeship of men at grips with a “morally neuter”
— frivolous, the Greeks called their gods — environment, the inchoate and
irresponsible flux of the universe, on which men, working in comradeship, impose
the order of their virtues and their reason. And the first of these is courage.
Life is all a great joke — but only the brave ever get the point. When James, W.
not H., said, “It is true if it works,” this very frontier, American sort of
thing, is what he meant. He meant, “If you can do work with it.” Only
truth can impose order on the environment of disorder. Our professor at a cowtown
university undoubtedly thinks it means “if you can ‘work’ some kind of
finagle with it.” The reason pragmatism got such a bad name is that it came to be
taught by people who did not work their way through school at jobs, but as
teaching assistants. Incongruity? Yes — but laughter comes with the mastery of
incongruity, like handling logs in a spring river, tossing sacks of wheat into a box car,
making babies, or cutting a cam that works right on your own machine. When August Kekule
saw his benzene ring, he laughed. In the Lankavatara Sutra, Buddha laughed at the
vision of compound infinitudes of universes. The great Turner picture is of “Ulysses Deriding
Polyphemus.” The tiny figure on its gaily caparisoned boat is laughing at
the bellowing man mountain. The Odyssey is a comedy.
Once these qualities go from humor it becomes sicklied o’er with the pale cast of
effeminacy. Compare Dorothy Parker or Ogden Nash with Lear:
There was an old man who said, “Hush,
I think there’s a bird in this bush.”
When they said, “Is it small?”
He replied, “Not at all.
It’s three times the size of the bush.”
Whimsy, like black lace underwear, is all right in its place. Great humor has a
savagery about it. This is why British humor stands up better than American in this
century — particularly British bawdry. All the great dirty limericks, like detective
stories, have English settings. It’s like English cooking, which is still that of
Boadicea’s day. True conservatives, the English have yet to wash off all their woad.
It is for this reason that, however subversive of the established order, so many great
humorists, especially satirists, Roman or British, have been Tories. The revolutionary
action of humor is a deeper thing than any current politics, and the humorist tends to
adopt these social attitudes which at least claim to ensure him the strongest connections
with the oldest, most fundamental, most human behavior.
In America, by and large, this has not been true. You can, or at least T.S. Eliot can,
create a “myth of conservatism,” but it is pretty damn hard to work up any myth
of the American business community. Henry Luce has spent billions trying and is still
working at it, but all the progress reports are negative. We do not usually think of Damon
Runyon as a radical, but go back and read the workingstiff dialect poetry he wrote when
the century was young. “It pays to git a plenty while you’re gittin’.”
And I will never forget the time I heard Will Rogers say, “I hear the Standard Oil
Company has adopted the motto, ‘We Serve the Public.’ Havin’ growed up on a
farm, I know jist what they’re a’ gittin’ at.” We forgive Mencken his
beer-cellar Nietzscheism. We forget that years ago, Pegler was hired by Scripps-Howard for
the same reason Heywood Broun was — he was a “fearless independent,” not a
gutta-percha bottle of corrosive rancors. By and large, though, American humor until well
into this century has been “radical.” All humor must be in the
etymological sense. Ours was also in the political. Out of the Masses, old and New,
came the major cartoonists of the period. Still unsurpassed, many of them are famous
today. The whole lithograph crayon technique, so closely identified with Buck Ellis and
Bob Minor, and originally developed for the IWW press, has about it the very essence of
completely autonomous, completely autochthonous, American workingstiff defiance.
Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley) is the author of: “Wan iv th’ strangest
things about life is that th’ poor, who need th’ money th’ most, ar-re
th’ very wans that niver have it.” “Don’t ask f’r rights. Take
thim. An’ don’t let anny wan give thim to ye. A right that is handed to ye fer
nawthin’ has somethin’ the mather with it. It’s more thin likely it’s
ony a wrrong turned inside out.” “’Tis a sthrange thing whin we come to
think iv it that th’ less money a man gits f’r his wurruk, th’ more
nicissary it ’tis to th’ wurruld that he shud go on wurrukin’. Yer boss kin
go to Paris on a combination weddin’ and divorce thrip an’ no one bothers his
head abouth him. But if ye shud go to Paris — excuse me laughin’ mesilf black in
th’ face — th’ industhrees iv th’ country pine away.” “Mebbe
’tis as bad to take champagne out of wan man’s mouth as it ’tis to take
rround shteak out of anather’s.” “It takes vice t’ hunt vice. That
accounts f’r polismen.” “I care not who makes th’ laws iv a nation, if
I can get out an injunction.” “Laws are made t’ throuble people, and
th’ more throuble they make th’ longer they shtay on the shtachoo books.”
“If me ancestors were not what Hogan calls regicides, ’twas not because they
wan’t ready an’ willin’, ony a king niver came their way.” “A
constitootional ixicative, Hinissey, is a ruler who does as he damn pleases an’
blames th’ people.”
What happened? Where did this kind of humor go? Don’t forget, Dunne wrote this
stuff for what they call the capitalist press. It went the same place the manual spark
lever and the choke went on cars. They were dangerous because women used them to hang
their purses on. Think of the environment in which Mr. Dooley was appreciated. Who rushes
the growler today? How many people chew Piper Heidsieck? How many smoke Five Brothers in a
corncob pipe? Humor must be about the basic verities.
The distinguishing mark of our contemporary humor, what has come to be called “New
Yorker humor,” is that it is of, for, and by the great bulk of our population
who live in interminably busy idleness, who are never at grips with their environment, but
who live by delegated powers and vicarious atonements. They are surrounded by the gadgets
that appear in the advertising columns alongside; when they have to do something as
elemental as driving a nail or mowing a lawn some whimsical disaster always takes place.
Like the movies, nothing ever happens that would offend any conceivable group or section
of the population, or in any way interfere with the sale of any commodity whatsoever.
Nothing important must happen — it would be bad for business.
A few comic strips linger on, Moon Mullins, The Katzenjammer Kids,
Williams’s Out Our Way. I wonder what the TV generation thinks of them? A
few towns still permit emasculated burlesque shows, but the comics are not allowed to
distract from the interminable parade of strippers. Chaplin is self-exiled. American
radicalism lost its sense of humor long ago. And of course “the media” chew up
everything, songs, jokes, “personalities” — 365 days times 24 hours —
this is a forest fire which consumes all in its path. What is wrong with American humor is
what is wrong with American life. It is commercialism. True humor is the most effective
mode of courage.
KENNETH REXROTH
1957
Most of Vance Randolph’s books are out of print, but one of the best is still
available: Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales (University of Illinois,
1976).
Finley Peter Dunne’s original “Mr. Dooley” volumes, which date from
around the turn of the century, are constantly going in and out of print. A good selection
is Mr. Dooley on Ivrything and Ivrybody (Dover, 1963).
Quite a few pieces are online at
www.boondocksnet.com/editions/dunne/ and
www.boondocksnet.com/ai/dooley/.
Rexroth’s first
encounter with Ozarkians is amusingly recounted in his autobiography.
This 1957 essay was reprinted in Bird in the Bush (1959) under the title
“Would You Hit a Woman With a Child, or Who Was That Lady I Seen You With Last
Night?”
Copyright 1959. Reproduced by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
[Rexroth essay
on Mark Twain] [Rexroth essay on Huckleberry
Finn]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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