American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny, by Christopher Miller

We started the year dipping into a delightful surprise – American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny, by Christopher Miller.  Arranged alphabetically, Miller enumerates the countless tropes so frequent in American comedy circa 1900-1966, and why they were funny and what they tell us about Americans of old.

Miller creates an artificial cutoff of 1966, citing anecdotally that the upheavals of the 1960s resulted in a seismic change in what America meant and, consequently, what it meant to be an American.  One would think that this is an invitation for Miller – a professor at Bennington College in Vermont and the author of Sudden Noises from Inanimate Objects – to take potshots at the Great American Century.  However, such is not the case at all, as Miller rightly sees the downside of our social “progress.”  More often than not, it would seem to Miller that the America of the 1920s, 30s and 40s was a funnier, and perhaps, better place than the country we know today.  (A sentiment with which we here at the Jade Sphinx are in full agreement.)

The book has entries on a wide array of laugh-getters, including falling safes and anvils, pratfalls, milquetoasts, flappers, hash, hobos, outhouses, rolling pins, castor oil, dishwashing husbands, nosey neighbors and noise – and that is just scratching the surface.  Miller also talks about many of the formerly great venues for this humor, including full-page comic strips, radio comedy, silent movies, and of course, joke books. 

Coming in at 544 pages, one would think that American Cornball more than overstays its welcome; however, one wishes the book was longer and some of the entries more detailed.

Miller’s particular genius is not just in enumerating instances of a comedic trope, but wondering why they were (or are) funny in the first place.  Miller has keen insight into the human condition, and finds many of his observations in the arena of the ridiculous.  Though not a philosopher like G. K. Chesterton (quoted, incidentally, in this volume), Miller’s worldview is that of an expansive humanist with a predisposition to the comic rather than the tragic. 

The encyclopedia format keeps the observations loose and light, and this also proves to be one of the few flaws in the book: when Miller really has something to say (which is often), he is hamstrung by his format.  One hopes that he will follow-up American Cornball with a collection of essays of greater depth and fewer topics, as there is much more for him to say.

But what he does say here is terrific and to be savored.  I read through the volume with a goofy smile plastered on my face – and how could anyone resist a book that cites the Three Stooges, W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers a source material?

Here is an example of Miller at his best, rifting on the subject of pain:  There is, as far as I know, not one scene in all of Henry James where a character of either sex sits on a thumbtack.  I haven’t read everything by Henry James, but I’ve read enough to know what the rest must be like, and nowhere do I see a thumbtack penetrating an unsuspecting buttock.  Stubbed toes are also few and far between, if they occur at all.  And unlike all those hapless dads on America’s Funniest Home Videos, the males in James’s arcadia never get it in the balls.

Good stuff, that, but better still, here he is midway on his discussion of morons:  In our culture, “That’s not funny” really means “It’s wrong to laugh at that,” which is why we sometimes say it even while laughing.  “That’s not funny” is only secondarily a report on the speaker’s true reactions, though it can be an effort to train those reactions.  If you strongly disapprove of something and therefore insist it isn’t funny, that isn’t quite as dishonest as insisting that O.J. Simpson was never a great running back because you hate the psychopathic asshole he later became.  No, it’s more like refusing to find an actress beautiful because you hate her personality.  Given the determination, you really can suppress your sense of humor, like your sense of beauty.  But if you say, “There’s nothing funny about mental retardation, and for the life of me I’ve never understood why anything thinks there is,” you must be either a hypocrite or a saint.  Either way, you’ve clearly forgotten the jokes of your childhood…..

Then there is this, on farting:  Before it became permissible to discuss farts openly, our forebears relied on all kinds of substitutes— from ducks to tubas, from foghorns to balloons. It may be that the fully lifelike simulation of farts became possible only with later improvements in sheet rubber, but in the pre-whoopee epoch it wasn’t necessary or even desirable for a noisemaker to sound exactly like the real thing; it just had to sound like something sometimes used to symbolize the real thing. Novelty makers are always boasting about how “realistic” their products are, but in this case, realism wasn’t wanted.  Instead, aspiring practical jokers were offered a range of metonymies and metaphors.  Even in our unembarrassed age, the whoopee cushion itself still claims to imitate a “Bronx cheer” or raspberry—not a fart but the imitation of one made by buzzing the lips in what linguists call a bilabial trill. (The reason that sound is called a “raspberry” is that it is or was cockney rhyming slang for “fart,” via “raspberry tart.”) The sound is the best simulation of a fart we can produce with our normal speech apparatus.  In the early 1930s, when whoopee cushions took the world by storm, raspberries too were in fashion, at least on the funny pages—both Dagwood and Popeye had recourse to them now and then.  A little later, Al Capp gave us Joe Btfsplk, the world’s biggest jinx, easily recognized by the small black cloud—a personal fart cloud? —hanging over him at all times. When asked how to pronounce Joe’s surname, Capp would respond with a raspberry, adding, “How else would you pronounce it?”

I loved American Cornball, and spent much of the past few weeks reading it aloud to all and sundry.  This is a treasure for anyone interested in humor – and a perfect gift for those without a sense of one.  Highly recommended – and Mr. Miller, more, please.

W.C. Fields By Himself, Edited by Ronald J. Fields

For those who thought we at The Jade Sphinx had procrastinated by waiting three weeks between posts, what would be the response when I confess that it took me 40 years to get around to reading this book?

I well remember when W.C. Fields By Himself was first released.  I was just 10 years old and already obsessed with the movie comedians of Hollywood’s Golden Age, perhaps W.C. Fields (1880-1946) most of all.  Media coverage was extensive.  Ronald J. Fields, grandson of the great man, had gathered his grandfather’s papers, saying, this book is really the autobiography that W.C. Fields would have written.  I merely compiled his own letters, writings, and thoughts; wrote the commentary and a short introduction.  I think this should become the definitive book on W.C. – not padded out with anecdotes and reminiscences that cry for credibility, but rather, a portrait of W.C. as he perceived himself, as he actually lived – the true story.

Was the 40-year wait worth it?  Well, yes… but for all the wrong reasons.

First off, this book is not a biography, nor the first draft of an autobiography.  What Ronald Fields did was, simply, take his grandfather’s papers and place them in some sort of coherent order – and even that is not strictly chronological.  There is no real effort to weave a biographical narrative around them, there is no insight or context, and much of the book seems padded (nay, bloated) with truly incidental correspondence.  (Do we really need nearly 15 pages of Fields’ letters to his wife, explaining why he’s sending a $15 check instead of a $20?  Wouldn’t it be better, for example, to explain their marital difficulties and simply reprint a letter or two?)  What Ronald Fields really did was gather what he had (both the deeply interesting and the merely tedious) and left it to the dedicated reader to make sense of it.

But, while this sounds like a deep criticism of the book – it’s not.  It is merely disappointment at a presumed biography/autobiography.  If you are interested in Fields, think he is funny, or want to know how the mind of one of the last century’s most creative funnymen worked, than this book is a goldmine.

Here is Fields in all of his contradictions – the sweet man who could be genuinely nasty, the generous family man who hated charities, the lover of freedom who liked J. Edgar Hoover.  You may not know the coherent story of his life once reading W.C. Fields By Himself, but you will know the man.

Here, for example, is Fields writing to studio head Jack Warner once Warner asked for a contribution to his favorite charity.  Warner thought if Hollywood’s elite did not contribute to his favorite charity, the country would descend into Communism:

Dear Mr. Warner:

Thanks for your letter of January 29, which, by the way, is my natal day.

I am sorry my notation on your letter was not more lucid and so cryptic.  I apologize.  I know that you are a busy man and it is fine of you to champion these worthy causes and I, like yourself, am adverse to Communism.  I never wish to see it rear its ugly head in America.  I appreciate and have enjoyed to the fullest our liberties and our freedom to do as we please, providing we do not break any of the laws of our country, not to be brow-beaten and threatened as I understand these unfortunate people are in Russia.

However, I thought your letter of January 19^th had a Communistic lash and I think you were quoted in one of the trade papers as threatening to expose all those who did not contribute an amount according to your ideas.  That is still your prerogative – to expose me and ruin me with the public and drive me out of moving pictures.  I know what I’ll do, I’ll go to India and become a missionary.  I hear there’s good money in that too.

I still want to take care of charities in my own way and personally.  I think this is one of our inalienable rights.

Sincerely,

W.C. Fields

It is the “I know what I’ll do, I’ll go to India” that really sells it. 

Then there is my favorite letter in the book – to the Christian Science Monitor after they panned his masterpiece, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.  Clearly, Fields did not suffer fools gladly:

Dear Editor:

On January 28^th in the Year of our Lord 1942, the Christian Science Monitor printed:

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break: W.C. Fields acting out a story with results that are by turns ludicrous, tedious, and distasteful.  There is the usual atmosphere of befuddled alcoholism.

If the chosen people decide that the Christian Science Monitor is expressing the thoughts of the majority of the people in the United States, it is possible they would bar me from their studios and bar my pictures from their theaters, which would force me into the newspaper business.  And if I used your tactics I might say:

The Christian Science Monitor: Day in and day out the same old bromides.  They no longer look for love and beauty but see so many sordid things that Mary Baker Eddy did not see in this beautiful world she discovered after trying her hand at mesmerism, hypnotism, and spiritualism before landing on the lucrative Christian Science racket.

Why I play in a picture in which I take a few nips to get a laugh (I have never played a drunkard in my life) I hope that it might bring to mind the anecdote of Jesus turning water into wine.

And wouldn’t it be terrible if I quoted some reliable statistics which prove that more people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol.

Your very truly,

A subscriber,

W.C. Fields

“The lucrative Christian Science racket” is a sentence for the ages. 

In retrospect, it’s perhaps for the best that I waited 40 years to wade through Fields’ papers – we never needed him more than we need him now.

W.C. Fields By Himself can be found on all major used-books sites, such Abebooks.com and Alibris.com.  For the Fields enthusiast, it is essential reading.

W. C. Fields

I wish someone would explain to me why, at this late date, comedy is still considered a lesser art?  When asked to name a great work of art, most people would name a tragic play or serious novel, or point at the work of Renaissance masters – but it is rare indeed for one to name a great comedy. 

This astonishes your correspondent.  Comedy is infinitely more difficult than tragedy; one remembers the dying words of the great tragedian Edmund Kean who said on his deathbed, “dying is easy; comedy is hard.”  Why great comic inventions are not received with the same veneration as our great tragedies says something about our inherent misconception that “high minded” also means “serious.”

One of the most fascinating comic artists of the early sound era was William Claude Dukenfield (1880-1946), better known as W. C. Fields.  Fields was born in Darby, Pennsylvania, and was bitten by the stage bug early in life.  He started his career in vaudeville, as a comedic juggler.  His prowess at juggling is in evidence in several of his films, most notably 1934’s The Old Fashioned Way.  (You can see it here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytgPGr6JhLo).  Though we think of Fields as heavy and ungainly, his training as a juggler left him with a remarkable physical grace -- a trait shared by many great comics.  Fields made several films during the silent era, but for all of his grace, sound was an essential part of what became the Fields persona.  

Or perhaps we should say personas, plural.  In the 1930, his most important film decade, Fields really only played two characters: a henpecked husband or a shifty conman.  The henpecked husband was a masterful creation: this Everyman was the perpetual victim of shrewish wives, vile children, pesky salesmen, and the very world around him.  Fields was besieged by stepped-in fly papers, sticky gloves, vanishing hats, stepped-upon rakes and falling objects.  The embattled Fields shares our common humanity and frustrations, helping us laugh at the constant assaults on our dignity and our persons. 

Fields the conman is, perhaps, a wish-fulfillment ideal of ourselves.  Fields the sharpster, unlike his henpecked persona, is the eternal talker and trickster, a man on the make.  (In My Little Chickadee Fields, holding a deck of cards, is asked: “is this a game of chance?”  He replies, “Not the way I play it.”)  Fields the crook is equal to nearly every occasion; his only real enemy is himself.

Though Fields the trickster has become part of our national folklore, I think Fields the Everyman is the more honest and accessible creation.  Watch Fields trying to get some sleep one morning on his front porch in It’s a Gift: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_xwqxz1Wio.  Or, better yet, a brilliant sequence from the same film where Fields, as a shopkeeper, deals with a blind and deaf man and a table of light bulbs:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y189-69cQPs&feature=related.  It’s a tribute to Fields’ genius that we can watch a blind and deaf man flailing around a store and still think it’s funny. 

Fields only really broke out of his established routines in 1935, when he played Mr. Micawber in MGM’s David Copperfield, directed by George Cukor.  It’s impossible to watch this film and not think of other possibilities for Fields inhabiting film versions of great novels, including everything from The Pickwick Papers to the title role in The Wizard of Oz (a part, incidentally, that he was offered).

The 40s were an unhappy decade for Fields.  Many of the great comedians of the 1930s found their more freewheeling style and easy surrealism inconsistent with a world embroiled in a global war, and Fields shared his decline with the Marx Brothers, Mae West and Laurel and Hardy.  Some of his later films, however such as The Bank Dick (1940) and 1941’s Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (certainly one of the strangest movies ever committed to celluloid) have great sequences and considerable charm.

Fields, a chronic alcoholic, died on Christmas day in 1946.  He had been hospitalized for various ailments for 22 months before winking at his nurse and passing from this life.  He is greatly missed by legions of people who believe that any man who hates dogs and small children can’t be all bad.

Tomorrow:  Mae West

Laurel and Hardy

It’s perhaps reasonable to say that American cinema’s Golden Age of Comedy occurred in the 1920s and 30s.  Silent clowns, such a Buster Keaton (1895-1966), Harold Lloyd (1893-1971) and Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), changed the very language of comedy during the silent era, and such diverse talents as W.C. Fields (1880-1946), Mae West (1893-1980) and the Marx Brothers gave voice to that language.

But few comedic talents have a more devoted following than Stan Laurel (1890 – 1965) and Oliver Hardy (1892 –1957).  To this day there are organizations nationwide operating under the umbrella group The Sons of the Desert (named after one of the team’s most famous films), with ‘tents’ in most major cities.  For sheer mania, Laurel and Hardy buffs give devotees of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Who and Star Wars/Trek a run for their money.

This fanaticism is understandable.  There is a certain alchemy to Laurel and Hardy; at their best, the team could bond with viewers in a deep and emotional manner impossible to their equally famous colleagues.

I was thinking a great deal about Laurel and Hardy while reading Stan and Ollie; The Roots of Comedy; The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy -- an excellent book on the duo saddled with two unpunctuated subtitles.  Once I was finished, I could honestly say that I wish I knew them.

The author, Simon Louvish (born 1947), does a fine job of detailing the story of their lives.  He promises upfront not to gloss over the very human failings of the two, and present a warts-and-all biography.  That he does, but the warts are not very disfiguring and both Laurel and Hardy emerge as fallible human beings who remain lovable.  And while Louvish may not be the most limpid stylist, he gets the job done.

Stan was a jobbing vaudevillian born in the UK to a theatrical family.  Ollie was born in Harlem, Georgia, to a near-do-well father and working mother.  As a boy, Ollie became fascinated by the possibilities of moving pictures, starting as a projectionist.  Stan traveled to the US as part of a comedy troupe (which included Chaplin!), and made several solo comedies that did not register much with audiences.

The pairing came about almost by accident, but after the first handful of their 107 co-starring films, the bare essentials were cemented and their screen personas set.

At this point, it’s essential for you to have had a taste of Laurel and Hardy (if you haven’t!) before proceeding.  Jump to YouTube and look for any of the following: Laughing Gravy, Beau Hunks (both 1931), Helpmates, The Music Box (both 1932) or watch the boys dance in Way Out West (1937).  If it were possible to crystalize joy, it’s this graceful and lovely dance!

Now, with that behind your belt, let’s see if we can analyze this magical combination.  I have a few ideas of my own:

Laurel and Hardy are not just a team or a duo, they are a couple.  It’s amazing how often they end up sharing the same bed, consoling one-another, protecting each-other, jointly raising surrogate children or caring for pets.  It is almost silly how all close male relationship are now read for how they are ‘coded’ either hetero-or-homosexual, but I read the onscreen Stan and Ollie as homosexual in the purest, nonsexual sense.  They loved one-another.

At heart, both Stan and Ollie are children.  Yes, Ollie is often more intelligent and given to greater attempts to master the situation; he is the senior child of the two, but that does not make him less of a child.  It is this engaging innocence (even when they’re being brats!) that so many people respond to.

This eternal childhood often makes them more (or less) than human.  As such, they don’t change and seem subject to different physical, social and intellectual laws than we.  It would seem as if the two great clowns were denizens of some alternate reality rather than our own prosaic surroundings.  They are, first and last, their own unique selves.   They are impervious within the protective cocoons of their own strangeness. 

Yet, for all of the strangeness of Laurel and Hardy, the recurring note is one of sweetness.  The couple had a core of sweetness – the kind of sweetness that comes from an innocent, inner benevolence.  Even at their worst behavior (which often results in massive destruction of property), there is that core of kindliness.

As film historian Randy Skretvedt has written: The world is not their oyster; they are the pearl trapped in the oyster.  Their jobs hang by a rapidly unraveling thread.  Their possessions crumble to dust.  Their dreams die just at the point of fruition.  Their dignity is assaulted constantly.  At times they can’t live with each other, but they’ll never be able to live without each other.  Each other is all they will ever have.  That, and the hope of a better day.

Though I enjoyed Stan and Ollie a great deal, I can’t help but feel that reading about great comedians is never as satisfying as watching them.  Fortunately, Laurel and Hardy are readily available online and in a new DVD collection gathering their best films.  Many of their later films, such as Air Raid Wardens (1943) and Nothing but Trouble (1944) are despised by purists, but I find them watchable still for the inescapable benevolence of the duo.  Make yourself happy – watch Laurel and Hardy.

Tomorrow:  W. C. Fields