Alistair Cooke on American Humor : Lecture: Unfortunately, the mellifluous PBS superstar’s frame of reference seemed somewhat behind the times.

Nothing soothes America’s cultural inferiority complex like having an Englishman tell us we’re great. Unfortunately, all too few Englishmen seem willing to do that; even the colonies of British rock stars in New York always seem to act like they’re slumming. Face it: There’s no way an Englishman can say “Big Mac, please” and not sound like he’s making fun of us. As a result, that rare Englishman we do manage to turn can ride the waves of New World gratitude to stardom. How else to explain Richard Dawson? Or, indeed, Alistair Cooke?

Of course, Cooke, who spent Friday night as the 1990-91 Leona Gerard visiting lecturer at UC Irvine, is a fine journalist who has well earned the respect of both his peers and his audience. He served for decades as an American correspondent for British newspapers, and, for the past 45 years, he has broadcast the weekly BBC radio essay “Letter From America.” For years, he’s been an articulate host for such television programs as “Omnibus,” “Masterpiece Theatre” and “Alistair Cooke’s America.”

But it’s not so much what Cooke says that’s won him such a following, it’s how he says it--with that accent, fine-tuned at Cambridge and carefully preserved from homogenization into the dreary pronunciations of New World broadcasting. No accident it was Cooke--and not, say, Charles Kuralt or any other home-grown anecdotist--that the U.S. Congress selected as keynote speaker for its Bicentennial celebration.

Or, by the same token, that UCI would name Cooke its Gerard lecturer, invite him to speak on American humor and charge $15 a seat to hear what he had to say (not to mention another $20 to take home a poster commemorating the event).

What Cooke brought to the Bren Events Center, however, was not a treatise on the cleft between “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and “Saturday Night Live,” an analysis of the principles underlying American knock-knock structure or a chronological journey from the aphoristic humor of Benjamin Franklin to the, er, anatomical wit of Andrew Dice Clay.

Instead, his “Short History of American Humor” (which, according to his publicist, is one of three prepared lectures Cooke can be hired to deliver) showed that for Cooke, American humor can best be understood by leafing through issues of the New Yorker, circa 1935.

Yes, Cooke did mention a more recent New Yorker writer named Woody Allen (upon seeing the Time magazine cover that wondered if God was dead, Cooke recalled Allen’s observation: “Not only is God dead, but you can’t get a good dentist on the weekend”). He read one of Andy Rooney’s pieces complaining about filling out forms. He discussed columnist Calvin Trillin’s campaign to replace the traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner with spaghetti carbonara.

But nothing, for Cooke, was quite as funny as reading H.L. Mencken make fun of the female body (“compared to it, the average milk jug is a thing of intelligent and gratifying design”) or recalling how F.D.R.’s vice president, John Nance Garner, described his job (Cooke remembered the famous remark as “not worth a spit in a bucket”).

For many of the 1,200 who took a break from watching the Persian Gulf War to see the 82-year-old PBS superstar, the old lines worked as well as anything Jay Leno or Gallagher could put out.

Some said they appreciated Cooke’s brief theoretical discussion, where he asserted that wit and humor could be distinguished by whether the jokes were self-mocking or intended to mock others. Some disagreed with his insistence that there were no female humorists worth mentioning (only wits, like Dorothy Parker, according to Cooke) but still were charmed by the presentation.

Speaking perhaps for many, UCI senior Susanne Caldwell said that Cooke “had a great style of speaking. And I learned a lot of names of people I had never heard of.”

But some members of the Irvine intelligentsia said they had hoped for a bit more from the Cambridge-, Yale- and Harvard-educated Cooke.

“I thought he was very amusing,” said Prof. Gregory Benford, the physicist and science fiction writer, “but the distinction he made between wit and humor is at an orthogonal axis to the way I look at it, in which humor combines the elements of ridicule and incongruity.

“Humor depends on thwarting expectation. It’s the dichotomy between the phraseology of the remark and its content that produces the effect,” something Cooke didn’t even hint at. Besides all that, Benford complained, Cooke didn’t utter a word about his favorite humorist, P.J. O’Rourke.

Describing Cooke as “soothingly middlebrow,” Jonathan Cohen, a graduate student in comparative literature, said the lecture “seemed to be a lot of fragments of other people’s work held together by subcutaneous tissue. His delivery was quite good, but it seemed Alistair coasted a bit.”

Proving the everyone’s-a-comedian maxim, Cohen went on to mention that he attended the lecture in part because of his scholarly interest in “phenomena such as irony.”

“I’ll define it by an example,” he said, lightning-quick: “ ‘Dan Quayle is a very smart guy.’ That’s a statement that’s not a deception yet is contrary to fact. It’s irony .”

Backstage after the lecture, however, Cooke wasn’t quibbling with the academics. He was thanking well-wishers, obliging autograph-seekers and, most important, going over his material.

“Some of the Robert Benchley is just too slow, just too subtle for the audiences today,” Cooke lamented. Perhaps thinking ahead to his next tour, he emphasized the stuff that worked.

“They love the James Thurber,” he said, smiling. “Can’t get enough of him.”