American Humorists

Looked at the library... and nothing struck me as particularly hilarious in the Humor section. Give me some Dr. Seuss and a Mad Magazine. Still I sat with some of these books, looked them over, and discovered that they were 20% to 40 % humorous. Maybe the overdose of political correctness today has taken some of the funny away, this joke is mean, that one is kind of sexist, the funny must be just right.

Some literary put -downs from a joke book.

Mark Twain may be our most famous humorist. Then there's the New Yorker magazine crowd. (Benchley Parker, Thurber, etc...)
Some of Ring Lardner's sports stories were funny enough that even if you had no interest in sports, you still enjoyed the stories. Stories that spotlight human foibles always seem to work.

I've read some modern humor collections; stories by Woody Allen ~ The Kugelmass Episode is a favorite. Steve Martin, Dave Barry, ~ I've never read any Garrison Keillor, I tried listening to an audio book by P.J. O'Rourke once. He seemed very confident, had his schtick together, but it fell flat somehow. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood or it was his voice, I don't know.

I remember someone telling me about Norman Cousins and the laughter as medicine movement, and please take joke books as gifts for cancer patients because a Jackie Mason book can help them heal. Is anyone still doing this when they visit hospitals? Some say that chimpanzees laugh. A few people say a lot of other animals laugh.

To laugh is to be self aware, I forget where I read that. I don't feel very self aware this morning.


"Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke."
- Steve Martin

" I am a writer. I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense. Imagine my ecstasy when I come across a hard, clean, bright, shiny number. Behold this gem of precision, perfect in its clarity and radiating mathematical reasonableness and arithmetical sensibility in every direction. I am free at last from the slime of words. Are shadows stretching their spectral arms to embrace the decline of day? Do vespers sound their quotidian knell? Does the gloaming echo with prelude to the nightingale’s descant? No! The sun sets at 7:56, and shut up."
-P.J. O'Rourke

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