Humor : Humorists Rough and Gentle

What I remember most clearly about fifth-grade science class is that 20 frogs escaped from the classroom aquarium the night before they were to be chloroformed and dissected. For the rest of the year, dead wizened amphibians kept turning up behind the water cooler and rolled-up maps in the corner. The second most exciting thing to happen that year in science class, because it actually has been useful in later life, was learning that experiments require a control, an element or object that remains constant and by which you can judge the others.

To wit, in reviewing four new books by contemporary humor writers, veteran funny guy James Thurber (1894-1961) shall serve as the control. Writing humor and especially humor that will endure, as Thurber himself was the first to admit, is a delicate art. “I guess books of humor don’t last because, like the passions, humor is a changing thing. It is likely to date because it deals in the modern idiom,” Thurber told an interviewer in 1952. Almost 40 years later, in this era of built-in obsolescence, that seems particularly true. The news stories (Irangate, Jimmy Swaggart’s sexual peccadilloes, Gary Hart’s flings) that provide the pegs upon which the authors hang many of the pieces in the collections reviewed here, have already, just a year or two after being written, faded from memory.

COLLECTING HIMSELF: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself (Harper & Row: $19.95) is the first new Thurber collection in 23 years and it’s a pip. Michael J. Rosen, the literary curator of Thurber House (the humorist’s boyhood home in Columbus, Ohio), has compiled about 50 previously uncollected Thurber pieces and 70 drawings. They include literary reviews and parodies, essays, and pithy snippets about writing and drawing taken from interviews with Thurber. All that’s wonderful about Thurber is on display here: the carefully constructed, graceful prose (“Three friends of mine, all of them writers, died this summer, for I have reached the time of life when a man’s contemporaries begin to drift away like autumn leaves, having attained their highest development and fullest color”); the wicked puns (“ . . . you look at life through Rhodes-scholared glasses”); and the brilliant parodies that so sharply poke fun at popular culture. My favorite piece, written in 1935, falls into the latter category. Called “Producers Never Think Twice,” it was written after Thurber read that Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone, then married, thought they’d be perfect for either a Broadway or film version of James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Thurber helpfully provided a script for the first reel. Joan, as the refined wife of a common hotdog stand owner, tells Franchot between one of her many costume changes: “If you wish to dine, I--I am desolated to tell you that we have only les francfortois , le jambon, and les steaks Hambourg ; avec , of course, cafe --either nature or a la creme .”

Of the contemporary writers, Randy Cohen, whose day job is writing for “Late Night With David Letterman” and the Nation, comes closest to Thurber in ambition and style. His 26 pieces in DIARY OF A FLYING MAN (Alfred A. Knopf: $16.95) are well-crafted, highly conceptual (sometimes too conceptual) and play off cultural trends and journalistic styles. The title story, about a man who suddenly finds himself able to fly, is Walter Mittyish, but with some very up-to-date twists. Cohen’s young aviator notes in his diary, “Flew to cash machine on way to work. It was out of order, so I flew to another. It took three stops before I finally got my money. I couldn’t even use a customer service phone to complain: some busted, some stolen. I shall write an angry letter. My fabulous ornithoid prowess makes me less passive in the face of institutional authority.” In “Radio Doctor,” Cohen takes on doctors who dispense advice over the airwaves by writing about a gynecologist whose program is called “What’s Up Down There.” “Her show ran from four to six in the afternoon, drive time, so most of her listeners were in their cars heading home from work,” he writes. “She felt like an odd combination of OB-gyn specialist and driving instructor: right there, that’s your cervix, and that long thing is your turn signal.”

Also very funny, though more of a slash-and-burn guy than a gently mocking Thurberite, is Paul Slansky, a regular contributor to Esquire’s annual Dubious Achievement Awards. Slansky bites down mercilessly on political and pop culture nincompoops, and he had plenty of targets upon which to chomp in the 1980s. His book, THE CLOTHES HAVE NO EMPEROR: A Chronicle of the American ‘80s (Fireside/Simon & Schuster: $12.95), is a day-by-day, year-by-year remembrance of the 1980s, concentrating particularly on the faux pas of Ronald Reagan (and Nancy), George Bush and that late but great starter, J. Danforth Quayle. Essentially, this is a clip job, but an elegantly clever one. Slansky manages to excoriate Reagan, Richard Nixon, William F. Buckley Jr. and ABC News:

“March 3: President Reagan reveals his ignorance of the condition of Central American roads by claiming that victory for the Sandinistas would create ‘a privileged sanctuary for terrorists and subversives just two days’ driving time from Harlingen, Texas.’

“March 5: After watching Bruce Springsteen sign autographs on a flight to Los Angeles, Richard Nixon introduces himself to the singer. ‘I notice that you sign your full name,’ he says. ‘And it’s such a very long name. When I was vice president, I remember going in to see President Eisenhower while he was signing a stack of letters. He looked at me and said, “Dick, you’re lucky to have a short name.” ’

“March 18: William F. Buckley Jr. suggests in The New York Times that everyone found to have AIDS ‘should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.’ The idea is not widely embraced.

“March 21: ABC’s ‘World News Tonight’ begins picking a ‘Person of the Week.’ ”

And that’s just one month. The ‘80s, wow, what a happenin’ decade!

It’s more fun to relive the actual follies of the ‘80s in Slansky’s book than it is to find them filtered through the typewriters (word processors?) of Art Buchwald and Lewis Grizzard. Both men are popular syndicated newspaper columnists who, every year or two, bundle together their daily offerings into collections that can, and I’m being generous here, only be recommended as dip-and-skip reads. Grizzard practically acknowledges this in his introduction to CHILI DAWGS ALWAYS BARK AT NIGHT (Villard Books: $17.95) when he writes: “This is going to be an easy book for you to read because it is a collection of my works and there is no plot, so you don’t have to start at the front and work your way back to the back if you don’t want to . . . This would be a good book to put in your guest bathroom.”

Both the Grizzard and Buchwald’s WHOSE ROSE GARDEN IS IT ANYWAY? (G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $18.95) rely on obvious premises and setups and then repeatedly turn to tried-and-true devices: Buchwald is a slave to two-person dialogues and Grizzard goes in for lists. There are several first-rate columns in each of these collections (Buchwald’s on the ubiquity of peppermill-grinding waiters, Grizzard’s on his errant father), but most of these pieces were better read the first time around, over morning coffee.

How to end this review? Let’s go back to Thurber, who writes of how difficult it is for a playwright to get a character to exit the stage. “I have frequently had to resort to dogfights. ‘I must go out and separate those dogs’ is not, however, a sound or convincing exit line for someone you have to get off the stage,” he writes. Me, I’ve got to go separate some dead frogs.

From “Collecting Himself” A Visit From St. Nicholas (In the Hemingway Manner)

It was the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren’t even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them.

The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn’t move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.

“Father,” the children said.

There was no answer. He’s there, all right, they thought.

“Father,” they said, and banged on their beds.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“We have visions of sugarplums,” the children said.

“Go to sleep,” said Mamma.

“We can’t sleep,” said the children. They stopped talking, but I could hear them moving. They made sounds.

“Can you sleep?” asked the children.

“No,” I said.

“You ought to sleep.”

“I know. I ought to sleep.”

“Can we have some sugarplums?”

“You can’t have any sugarplums,” said Mamma.

“We just asked you.”

There was a long silence. I could hear the children moving again.

“Is Saint Nicholas asleep?” asked the children.

“No,” said Mamma. “Be quiet.”

“What the hell would he be asleep tonight for?” I asked.

“He might be,” the children said.

“He isn’t,” I said.

“Let’s try to sleep,” said Mamma.

The house became quiet once more. I could hear the rustling noises the children made when they moved in their beds.

Out on the lawn a clatter arose . . .