A Treasury of Laughter

LAUGHTEK is something, in the approximate words of Sir Max Beerbohm, of which no one has ever died. He ought to know. Another man who ought to know is Louis Untermeyer, editor of the present assembly; and after some vastly cheerful hours in the company of his selections I am ready to say that he is one of the top authorities. His anthology arrives as something new in the field, covering such disparate matter as humorous stories, poems, essays, tall tales, jokes, boners, epigrams, “memorable” quips, and “devastating" crushers. We have had in recent years two very fine and comprehensive volumes of laughter: A Subtreasury of American Humor, edited by E. B. White and Katharine S. White, and A Treasory of British Humor, edited by Morris Bishop. It seemed to one reader that these two books, which ought to he boxed as an entity, practically slammed the door in the face of other contenders for at least a decade to come. But no. Here is Mr. Untermeyer with something else again — British and American — as a worthy third.

One always looks for omissions in a book like this; it would be disappointing not to find some. A few readers will fail to understand why Sir A. P. Herbert. W. W. Jacobs. Noel Coward. A. A. Milne. Walter D. Edmonds, and Phyllis Metiinley. for example, have no reserved seats. Herbert and Edmonds especially: for who can be funnier than A. P. H.? and the author of Drains Along the Mohawk has other risibles up his sleeve besides the much-anthologized “Death of Red Peril.”But this is Mr. Untermeyer’s choice, and the main thing to observe is that he has chosen brilliantly and widely. He eschews for the most part the terribly well known: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty ” is still a Thurber ascendant, one may suppose. But there are many sketches by the late Stephen Leacock even funnier than “My Financial Career.” It is joy itself, however, to find resurrected from forgotten pages of the parent Life the little Lardner sapphire called mysteriously “I Gaspiri - ‘The Upholsterers. ”

As to small change: than Mr. Untermeyer, no one can tell a good story better. Even pedestrian old stuff is pretty spruce under his editing, and the really good jokes take wing. You don’t have to rummage in this collection. Just open it — and chain it down.

DAVID MCCORD