In With the Old
People like to say that writing comedy is harder than writing tragedy and that we’ve been saying the same funny things over and over since time immemorial because real humor says something universal and enduring, etc., etc., etc. “This is a cheap, dopey explanation, and I’m upset that you suggested it,” Steve Martin declares in the introduction to Modern Library’s Wit & Humor Series, which he edited. (You know wit — wit is when you read something that forces you to make that wise and wry expression as you shake your head in a very knowing way, especially when other people are around, and humor is when you laugh out loud.) “I prefer to think that transcendent humor is the product of funny people, and that’s all there is to say,” Martin writes. His funny people: Mark Twain (Mark Twain’s Library of Humor), S.J. Perelman (Most of the Most of S.J. Perelman), Nora Ephron (Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women), and Benjamin Franklin (Wit and Wisdom From Poor Richard’s Almanack). “Unlike as in most of the arts, greatness in comedy is not necessarily judged by its ability to transcend generations,” Martin observes. “Comedy is designed to make people laugh now, not three generations later, and it would be a poor stand-up comedian who suggested waiting forty-five years for a joke to take hold.” It’s still funny when S.J. Perelman, who penned the Marx Brothers classics Monkey Business and Horse Feathers and wrote for The New Yorker for nearly 50 years, describes being given a membership in the Fruit-of-the-Month Club: “If, about Christmas time, you notice me sporting a curious insignia on my vest, a stipple of small white spots as though I had been eating Royal Riviera pears with a spoon, it may interest you to know that you are looking at a full-fledged, bona fide member of the original Fruit-of-the-Month Club. This is not to be confused with the Fruit-of-the-Loom Club, an organization I also belong to, which allows me to sleep an hour later than nonmembers.” (Those of us who have a weakness for underwear humor have to stick together.) Modern Library has other series of books, like one on adventure edited by Jon Krakauer, one on movies edited by Martin Scorsese, a “War Series” edited by Caleb Carr, and the Food Series, edited by Ruth Reichl, will begin in February, but humor is where it is for me… Find more Perelman in The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan (Houghton Mifflin, 598 pp., $30), in addition to all the usual suspects you’d expect to find in an excellent anthology like this: E.B. White (“Once More to the Lake”), Cynthia Ozick (“A Drugstore in Winter”), Katherine Anne Porter (“The Future Is Now”), Susan Sontag (“Notes on Camp”), John McPhee (“The Search for Marvin Gardens”), Eudora Welty (“A Sweet Devouring”)… The person who has everything probably doesn’t have Elizabeth I: Collected Works (University of Chicago Press, 448 pp., $40), in which all of the Virgin Queen’s letters, poems, speeches, and prayers have been gathered for the first time in one volume. It’s not all light reading, though: The book includes the “Golden Speech” Elizabeth gave at the end of her reign, but also her orders to torture suspected traitors (“you shall cause them to be put to the rack, and to feel the taste thereof until they shall deal more plainly”).
This article appears in December 15 • 2000.