‘Dumbth’ : In His Own Words, Comedian-Author Steve Allen Wittily Warns America That It’s Losing Its Smarts

What’s the world coming to? A lot of Americans don’t know where Mexico is. They think Delaware is a city. Asked to name a tribe that has invaded England, they answer, “The Aztecs.” They ask actor Robert Young for medical advice, just because he played Dr. Marcus Welby on television, and they write letters to Kentucky Derby winners.

“Not the jockey, not the trainer, but the horse,” said an incredulous Steve Allen.

With a look of inspired mystification, the veteran comedian-author-songwriter paused in his description, bolstered by studies and personal experiences, of creeping dumbness in America to picture somebody actually writing a letter to a horse. “Something like, ‘Dear Seabiscuit. . . . Thanks for winning the Kentucky Derby. I won 28 bucks on you. Keep up the good work . . . ‘ “

The Caltech audience chortled appreciatively.

“The American people are dumber now than they have been in a very long time,” said Allen, who has written a book called “Dumbth” on the subject.

Allen, 68, has come a long way since he commanded a squad of wacky characters in the NBC studios in New York, on the original “The Tonight Show.” In those days, more than 30 years ago, the bespectacled host might have traded gibes with some New Jersey cheerleaders in the audience, hooked himself up to a vibrating girth-reducing machine or chatted amiably with entertainers Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, before diving into a nine-foot vat of Jell-O.

But this is the Beckman, Caltech’s airy, wedding cake-shaped auditorium. The antic “Steverino” (as one character on “The Tonight Show” used to call him) of the 1950s and 1960s seems to have given way in this sedate hall to a pleasant, thoughtful social critic. He’s here to talk about a deterioration of basic intelligence in America.

“Dumbth” (Allen’s own term) is a spreading incompetence, illiteracy and gullibility across the land. “It’s a combination of ignorance and stupidity, plus some unidentified ingredients,” he said.

There aren’t any New Jersey cheerleaders here tonight. The sold-out audience of 1,164 is mostly middle-aged--many of them scientists, teachers and technicians--with enough concentrated brain power to turn out an encyclopedia in two hours flat.

Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, sat in the same row with Paul MacCready, the visionary inventor of a human-powered airplane and solar-powered car. Caltech faculty and members of Southern California Skeptics, co-sponsor of the event and recipient of its proceeds, jammed the center of the auditorium.

Somehow or other, though, the laughs just keep bubbling up from somewhere in Allen’s restless psyche.

He handled some written questions from the audience, talking about the sources of his inspiration (he doesn’t know what they are), his syndicated show “Host To Host,” shown locally on KABC-TV, and the things that make him laugh (Dan Quayle).

“As a group, you’re a little on the flaky side,” he said, riffling through a stack of question cards. He read one of them. “‘What is a semiconductor?’ I’ll give you a definition by example. I would say Lawrence Welk.”

Another one, purportedly from Jesus Morales of Tijuana, asked: “If Jesus was Jewish, how come he had a Mexican name?”

Then he did what he always appeared most comfortable doing on stage (or screen)--noodling on the Steinway while he gabs into a microphone. “Every few years, there’s a hit song or two in which the singer’s heart is breaking because something reminds him of a lost love,” Allen said, playing a few bars of “These Foolish Things.” “But why is it that nobody writes about the bad memories?”

Somebody has, of course. Allen launches into his own version of the 1936 standard. “A greasy meatball that’s all cold and moldy . . . A stupid song that’s now a golden oldie . . . “

The audience responds as delightedly as if it were 1956 and they had all traveled on a lark to the television studio at Rockefeller Center, taking the bus through the Lincoln Tunnel or riding the subway in from Brooklyn--which some of them, at earlier times in their lives, actually had done.

“I was raised on Steve Allen,” retired physics professor Herb Segall, a transplanted New Yorker, said after the show. “He was spontaneous, he was witty . . . “

Actually, Allen, an owlish man in a plaid jacket, long ago staked a claim on the affections of the thinking public. Besides his late-night television hijinks, he has written books, scores for musicals, hit songs and a play, “The Wake,” which won a Los Angeles drama critics’ nomination as the best play of 1977.

Many of those who snapped up the tickets for Tuesday’s performance at the Beckman remembered him most fondly for creating and hosting the PBS-TV series “Meeting of Minds,” in which historical figures like Galileo, Cleopatra, Darwin, Ulysses S. Grant and Marie Antoinette talked and debated about international issues.

“I was always serious, but people didn’t know about it,” Allen said. “If you do a comic monologue, you may be seen by 27 million people, whereas, if you write a serious book or a serious song, you may be home along with a tape recorder or a piano.”

His serious purpose this night, he said, is to warn about a kind of incipient amnesia in America. Not only are Americans losing a sense of world geography, but they’re also forgetting their place in history, he said. Allen talked about efforts by historical organizations to attract students to the field. “It’s as if nutritionists had to publish papers on the importance of drinking water,” he said.

It’s time for serious action. “If the situation has really gotten that bad, it’s time to get out of here right now and surround our schools with firebrands,” he said. “Maybe we should start a revolution tomorrow morning.”

Most of those lining up afterward for autographs on copies of Allen’s books agreed. “People are better at getting through the system without getting an education,” saidChuck Redin, a youthful entrepreneur from West Hills.

Miriam Segall, a retired high school English teacher from Pasadena, regrets a general lack of education and skills training in the home. “Kids come to school now, and they can’t tie their shoelaces,” she said. “They can’t tell time. They can’t count by twos. When I was a child in New York, you were afraid of being left behind. You learned all of that from your mother.”

They clustered around Allen, a voluble conversationalist, trading anecdotes and observations. “Dear Steve,” said one white-haired woman. “I love you, but how could you have left out the environment?”

“I left out most of the universe,” Allen said, chuckling.

Weren’t there a lot of dumb kids when he went to school, someone asked. Not that dumb, he insisted. “There was nobody in my group of 10-year-olds who didn’t know where Canada was,” he said. “We all just accepted the fact that we had to learn how to tie our shoes and what seven times five was.”

Maybe so, said Tom Yunck, Jet Propulsion Laboratory telecommunications manager and a confirmed skeptic. “Far fewer American-trained people are qualified for the work we do,” he conceded. “Almost all the good applicants are foreign-born and foreign-trained.”

But are people dumber than they used to be? Yunck gave a skeptical shake of the head. “I would say that he (Allen) has not proved that by his talk tonight,” Yunck said.