American Humor

THE woman who is managing the only English periodical printed in Moscow to-day told me that American humor was responsible for what trouble she had with the censor. To the Russian, exaggeration in jokes seemed neither funny nor admissible.

Exaggeration, certainly, is as native to our wit as understatement is to the English risibility. The one shocks, the other nudges the humor. But humor is contemporaneous. The exaggeration of Bill Nye is a plain bore to-day; Twain’s Jumping Prog was exaggeration, and to the twentieth century not so very funny; Mr. Dooley gave you something more subtle with bis dose; and, coming down to the humorists of our time, you find mixed with their exaggeration what Benehley, speaking of Peter Arno, calls ‘a transcendental quality of dementia which amounts to genius.’

Humorists, of course, grow up in magazines. The timeliness and dispatch of weekly publication seem to be good for them. Robert Benehley and Gluyas Williams made names for themselves in Life, as did Oliver Herford and Charles Dana Gibson before them; Ogden Nash and the artists Arno and Soglow are stars in that New Manhattan Galaxy, the New Yorker. Bred in such timeliness, it is asking a good deal of their work to give us when compiled in book form something of that irresistible shock and laughter with which we discovered it in the magazine.

Since age is before beauty, we come first to that grizzled old King (of American Humor — see blurb), Hubert Benehley, who in his youth learned a thing or two from Stephen Leaeock and. putting two and two together, originated a style very much his own. Ilis papers and burlesques of the past two years have been brought together in The Treasurer’s Report, and Other Aspects of Community Singing (Harpers, $2.00), and to set off his text there are some forty harmonious illustrations by his team mate, Gluyas ’Williams. Being a fan, I am always ready to laugh at these two, and at Benehley especially when, as in this volume, there are half a dozen papers as delicious as anything he has ever done: the title piece, ' Las Los,’ ‘The Sunday Menace,’ ‘The People Who Had the House Before,’ to piek sure winners. Benehley is best when least responsible; when he is conscious of his theme he is apt to labor it, as in the chapter on ‘The King’s English. But at his best you can read and reread him with delight. Feeling analytical, I should like to point out the skill with which he parodies the clichés in our American speech, the absurd exaggeration which lie packs into his parentheses, and the fillip which is to be found in the last sentence of his paragraphs,

Peter Arno’s second volume of drawings, Hullabaloo (Horace Liveright, $3.00), shows — as did his Parade of last year — that he deserves most of the good that is said about him. His effects are bold and instantaneous (the difference between American and English humor is perfectly demonstrated by comparing the drawings of Arno and Max Beerbohm), his composition excellent; his single-line black and whites revolutionized ‘the technique of picturized jokes,’ his Whoops Sisters measured him at once against Belcher; he is disrespectful and farseeing; he lampoons the worst of smartness and vulgarity and makes New York laugh at itself; best of all, he is ingeniously funny. The frontispiece to Hullabaloo is a prime example of his satire; the Cat and the Couple and ‘Oh, Redskin!’ are as funny as drawings can be. More power to his elbow!

The verses of Ogden Nash, or, as they are called, Hard Lines (Simon and Schuster, $2.00), are afflicted with that same mingling of dementia and exaggeration. He is the most foolish, most nimble, and most entertaining versifier we have. His wit can be timely, as witness his classic lines of Welcome to Admiral Byrd: —

It can be as brief as Arno’s jokes, as witness: —

or: —

In short, he has an enviable mania for making incredible (and laughable) rhymes about the incredible personae of the United States, himself included. His lines to Bernarr Macfadden, Arthur Brisbane, Senator Smoot and his Censorship, touch off these dignitaries in a way to do the heart good. His caricatures in verse, his satires in general, have that freshness and point which are the joy of magazine readers and — a few at a time — uproarious when read aloud. The verse has been illustrated by Soglow, whose captionless drawings are dear to New Yorkers. Soglow is best when by himself, but certainly some of his pages do justice to ‘The Golden Trasliery of Ogden Nashery.’