But Enough About You: Essays

This irksome quote weighed on me as I cobbled together this collection. I’ll willingly cop to being a trivial fellow, but I can say with a straight face that my goal has never been to bore the reader. Still, Mr. Maugham does have a point, blast him. Maybe I’ve been going about this all wrong. But I’m sixty-one now, so it’s a bit late in the game to be worrying about that.

Some years ago I found myself on a panel with Bruce McCall, Steve Martin, and Wendy Wasserstein, three nontrivial artists well known to Thalia, Muse of Comedy. I forget what exactly our topic was, but it must have had something to do with the business of trying to make people laugh. I do seem to recall that before long we were all whingeing about humor’s second-class status.

The nontrivial P. J. O’Rourke, one of the wittiest and smartest writers in the business, memorably remarked, “Humor sits at the Children’s Table of Literature.” Somewhere among P.J.’s abundant trove of
bon mots
is his observation that “Anyone can draw a crowd by standing up and shouting, ‘I have cancer!’ But try doing it with forty-five minutes of stand-up.” When P.J. got cancer some years later, I couldn’t resist calling him up to say, “Trying to draw a crowd, are we?” Happily, the cancer is now gone for good, and even without it P.J. continues to draw big crowds.

During the panel discussion, Wendy Wasserstein said that someone had once condescendingly told her that she really ought to try “serious” writing instead of comedy. “I said to him, ‘Think writing funny is easy, do you? Really?
You
try it.’ ”

Well, only five paragraphs in and already wallowing in self-pity. We just can’t get no respect. It’s an old lament, and sometimes itself comic.

Toward the end of his life, Robert Benchley, one of the twentieth century’s great practitioners of literary humor, became obsessed with the idea of writing something serious. Making people laugh—even to the point of reducing them to tears—was no longer enough for him. He had never wanted to be a mere “funnyman.” (His coinage, I believe, and no compliment.)

Benchley was a keen student of British history. He resolved to write a book on the Queen Anne era of early eighteenth-century Britain, when the Enlightenment was popping up everywhere like spring bluebells. According to his biographer, this would be nothing less than “a new, analytical history.”
^IBenchley amassed a library of one hundred books on the subject. Periodically, he would seal himself off in a hotel room with his secretary, a former hatcheck girl, to work on his elusive masterwork. (For the purpose of scholarship, not shenanigans, though to be sure Mr. Benchley was no stranger to those.)

His new analytical history did not eventuate. There’s an amusing and telling quote in the biography courtesy of his son Nathaniel Benchley, author of a little novel called
The Off-Islanders
that became the basis for the movie
The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
Nathaniel’s son Peter wrote a monster best seller about a vengeful shark, providing the Benchley dynasty with a trifecta.

Nathaniel notes that his dad was hampered in his quest to write history by a scholarly version of obsessive-compulsive behavior. If he came across some informational lead, he
had
to follow it, wherever it went. And then had to follow that, wherever
it
led. And so on. “At dawn he was still awake, the floor littered with books, determinedly reading some passage in a volume totally unrelated to the Queen Anne era.” Lucky for him he lived before the Age of Google.

As for the bottom line: his biographer posits that Benchley’s Scheherazade-style research kept him “from having to confront the fear
that often gnaws at those who find themselves bearing the mantle of humorist—that, when the chips were down, he would find himself unable to write adequately on a serious topic.”

More on that “mantle of humorist” in a moment. Meanwhile, my own theory is that most humorists—to use that awful word—find their way to Thalia’s workshop after discovering themselves incompetent in other, more practical professions. (Cosmetic surgery, personal injury law, gun industry lobbying, etc.)

Benchley’s career as a student at Harvard inclines me to this insight. He had to sit for a final exam in which he was asked to “discuss the arbitration of the international fisheries problem in respect to hatcheries, protocol, and dragnet and travel procedure as it affects (a) the point of view of the United States and (b) the point of view of Great Britain.”

Benchley stared at the question, then took up his pencil and wrote, “I know nothing about the point of view of Great Britain in the arbitration of the international fisheries problem and nothing about the point of view of the United States. Therefore, I shall discuss the question from the point of view of the fish.”
^III like to think he got an A, but those Harvard profs can be sticklers.

As to “mantle of humorist.” Mantle seems, gosh, an awfully grand term. In the pages of this book, I cite a
New Yorker
cartoon in which a Washington, D.C., politician scowls at his secretary as she approaches his desk, holding in outstretched arms a folded garment.

“No, no, Miss Clark! I asked you to bring in the Mantle of Greatness, not the Cloak of Secrecy.”

That’s
more like it. I doubt Robert Benchley ever thought he was wearing a mantle over his shoulders. He’d have more likely called it a negligee.

As for “humorist” . . . I know a few folks who earn their daily bread by making people laugh, either with word processor or paint brush or on stage, and I can’t remember a one of them ever referring to him or herself as a “humorist.” Why would you? It’s only asking for it.
You’re a humorist? Yeah? Say something humorous.
I’ve never called myself by the odious term, but I have heard these scrotum-tightening words, and shuddered. “Comic,” on the other hand, or “Comedian” are another matter. They’re straightforward job descriptions and in any case hardly apply to me, alas.

“Satirist”? Problematical. As the playwright George S. Kauffman permanently defined it: “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.”
Satirist
is no insult, but it’s a ten-dollar word. Would you put it on your passport application under “Occupation”? On your business card? Tombstone? Perhaps.
Here lies John Q. Jones. Husband. Father. Satirist.
Maybe that’s it: a satirist is a dead humorist—who concentrated on pointing out everyone else’s failings rather than his own. The old
saeva indignatio
: Latin for fierce indignation. It’s on the gravestone of the greatest satirist of them all, Jonathan Swift. (It should be pointed out, I suppose, that he made
his
living as a preacher.)

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