by Roy Blount
Another thing that struck me as pivotal was the deep structural drollery of Norman Mailer’s referring to himself as “Mailer” and as a “radical conservative” in Armies of the Night: Mailer the Committed was not right-thinking but loopy, recombinant and foxy. But although Mailer, like Kafka, has complained that readers miss his jokes, Humor was not his line. And Roth was not writing Humor pieces.
I did not begin to feel that Humor piecework was coming back as an occupational possibility until Nora Ephron’s Esquire columns on women were collected as Crazy Salad, a best-seller. In one of those columns Ephron said she had grown up wanting to be Dorothy Parker and to write for the New Yorker, but she had gotten over both those ambitions. In the process, however, she had resolved matters of modern womanhood on the level of Humor. This was no small step for mankind.
Then, in Rolling Stone, Hunter S. Thompson took drugs out of the realm of stuporous religiosity and into Humor of a hellacious, wolverine-ridden kind. Along the way, at some cost to his cogency, he did American culture the service of running controlled substances into the ground.
Meanwhile Humor reached out in many directions. Woody Allen brought in Freud; Wilfrid Sheed actually wrote funny literary criticism; Fran Lebowitz put starch into Camp; Garrison Keillor blended the spirits of E. B. White and Saint Francis of Assisi; Calvin Trillin found merriment in food, demography, and leftism.
The Best of Modern Humor reflects this opening up and renewal of the old Subtreasury tradition. All the writers I have mentioned, except for Mailer and (regrettably) Hunter Thompson, are represented. The aforementioned Portnoy excerpt is included; and Ephron’s robust piece on being flat-chested; and Trillin’s savory column on the de la Rentas’ salon, in which he refers to himself as “Calvin of the Trillin” (Mark Twain claimed to have served in the Confederate army with a man who spelled his name d’un’Lap). The selection by Mr. Keillor (“Shy Rights: Why Not Pretty Soon?”) is less rich than such spookily moving pieces of his as “Drowning 1954” and “After a Fall,” but shyness has a deep significance in the tradition of Benchley, Thurber, and White; and Keillor, in all due modesty, has faced shyness down.
Whether feverish or laid-back, Humor springs from a certain desperation, which uses jujitsu on looming fear and shame, flirts almost pruriently yet coolly with madness and sentimentality, and fuses horse sense with dream logic. Asked about what it takes to write jokes, Woody Allen once replied, “That leap. I’m scared of dead patches.”
Richler is a venturesome anthologist, and it is interesting that he found Humor in Naipaul, Saul Bellow, and Truman Capote. But how come Max Beerbohm isn’t in this book? It is easy to carp about omissions from any anthology, and laughter is a personal matter. But Beerbohm knew laughter inside out. In an essay called “Laughter,” Beerbohm recalled, from Boswell, the time that Dr. Johnson broke up over a will written by a Mr. Chambers:
“Certainly there is nothing ridiculous in the fact of a man making a will. But this is the measure of Johnson’s achievement. He had created gloriously much out of nothing at all. There he sat, old and ailing and unencouraged by the company, but soaring higher and higher in absurdity, more and more rejoicing, and still soaring and rejoicing after he had gone out into the night.”
*In 1972, Kent Hannon, then of Sports Illustrated, interviewed Coach Bryant in his office and noticed on the bookshelf a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint. Asked whether he had been reading such a book, the Bear denied any knowledge of what it contained or how it got there. I have never known what to make of this. Did he use it in preparing hygiene lectures for his boys?
About the Author
Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-three books. The first, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, was expanded into About Three Bricks Shy … and the Load Filled Up. It is often called one of the best sports books of all time. His subsequent works have taken on a range of subjects, from Duck Soup, to Robert E. Lee, to what cats are thinking, to how to savor New Orleans, to what it’s like being married to the first woman president of the United States.
Blount is a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, an ex-president of the Authors Guild, a usage consultant for the American Heritage Dictionary, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and a member of both the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the band the Rock Bottom Remainders.
In 2009, Blount received the University of North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe Prize. The university cited “his voracious appetite for the way words sound and for what they really mean.” Time places Blount “in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H. L. Mencken and W. C. Fields.” Norman Mailer has said, “Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I’ve read in a long time.” Garrison Keillor told the Paris Review, “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence.”
Blount’s essays, articles, stories, and verses have appeared in over one hundred and fifty publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, the Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, the Oxford American, and Garden & Gun. He comes from Decatur, Georgia, and lives in western Massachusetts.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Many of these pieces have previously appeared in the following publications: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Atlantic, Boston University Journal, Columbia Journalism Review (“The In-House Effect,” September/October 1980; “Weekly News Quiz,” September/October 1979), Cosmopolitan Country Journal, Eastern Airlines Pastimes, Esquire, Harvard Magazine, Inside Sports, More, New Satirist, New West, The New Yorker (“Whose Who?,” “That Dog Isn’t Fifteen,” “Notes from the Edge Conference,” “For the Record”), Organic Gardening, Oui, Playboy, Soho News, Sports Illustrated. “One Pig Jumped” and “Merely Shot in the Head” copyright © The New York Times Company, 1978, 1980; reprinted by permission.
Excerpt from The True Confession of George Barker reprinted by permission of New American Library; copyright © George Barker, 1964. “The Bourgeois Blues,” words and music by Huddie Ledbetter, edited with new material by Alan Lomax, reprinted by permission; TRO copyright © Folkways Music Publishers, Inc., 1959.
Copyright © 1967, 1968, 1970, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Roy Blount Jr.
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4804-5774-4
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