On Writing Well - William Zinsser 2001

19 Humor
Part III Forms

Humor is the secret weapon of the nonfiction writer. It’s secret because so few writers realize that humor is often their best tool—and sometimes their only tool—for making an important point.

If this strikes you as a paradox, you’re not alone. Writers of humor five with the knowledge that many of their readers don’t know what they are trying to do. I remember a reporter calling to ask how I happened to write a certain parody in Life. At the end he said, “Should I refer to you as a humorist? Or have you also written anything serious?”

The answer is that if you’re trying to write humor, almost everything you do is serious. Few Americans understand this. We dismiss our humorists as triflers because they never settled down to “real” work. The Pulitzer Prizes go to authors like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, who are (God knows) serious and are therefore certified as men of literature. The prizes seldom go to people like George Ade, H. L. Mencken, Ring Lardner, S. J. Perelman, Art Buchwald, Jules Feiffer, Woody Allen and Garrison Keillor, who seem to be just fooling around.

They’re not just fooling around. They are as serious in purpose as Hemingway or Faulkner—a national asset in forcing the country to see itself clearly. Humor, to them, is urgent work. It’s an attempt to say important things in a special way that regular writers aren’t getting said in a regular way—or if they are, it’s so regular that nobody is reading it.

One strong editorial cartoon is worth a hundred solemn editorials. One Doonesbury comic strip by Gany Trudeau is worth a thousand words of moralizing. One Catch-22 or Dr. Strangelove is more powerful than all the books and movies that try to show war “as it is.” Those two works of comic invention are still standard points of reference for anyone trying to warn us about the military mentality that could blow us all up tomorrow. Joseph Heller and Stanley Kubrick heightened the truth about war just enough to catch its lunacy, and we recognize it as lunacy. The joke is no joke.

This heightening of some crazy truth—to a level where it will be seen as crazy—is the essence of what serious humorists are trying to do. Here’s one example of how they go about their mysterious work.

One day in the 1960s I realized that half the girls and women in America were suddenly wearing hair curlers. It was a weird new blight, all the more puzzling because I couldn’t understand when the women took the curlers out. There was no evidence that they ever did—they wore them to the supermarket and to church and on dates. So what was the wonderful event they were saving the wonderful hairdo for?

I tried for a year to think of a way to write about this phenomenon. I could have said “It’s an outrage” or “Have these women no pride?” But that would have been a sermon, and sermons are the death of humor. The writer must find some comic device—satire, parody, irony, lampoon, nonsense—that he can use to disguise his serious point. Very often he never finds it, and the point doesn’t get made.

Luckily, my vigil was at last rewarded. I was browsing at a newsstand and saw four magazines side by side: Hairdo, Celebrity Hairdo, Combout and Pouf. I bought all four—to the alarm of the news dealer—and found a whole world of journalism devoted solely to hair: life from the neck up, but not including the brain. The magazines had diagrams of elaborate roller positions and columns in which a girl could send her roller problem to the editors for their advice. That was what I needed. I invented a magazine called Haircurl and wrote a series of parody letters and replies. The piece ran in Life and it began like this:

Dear Haircurl:

I am 15 and am considered pretty in my group. I wear baby pink rollers, jumbo size. I have been going steady with a certain boy for 21/2 years and he has never seen me without my rollers. The other night I took them off and we had a terrible fight. “Your head looks small,” he told me. He called me a dwarf and said I had misled him. How can I win him back?

Heartsick

Speonk, N.Y.

Dear Heartsick:

You have only yourself to blame for doing something so stupid. The latest “Haircurl” survey shows that 94% of American girls now wear rollers in their hair 21.6 hours a day and 359 days a year. You tried to be different and you lost your fella. Take our advice and get some super-jumbo rollers (they come in your favorite baby pink shade, too) and your head will look bigger than ever and twice as lovely. Don’t ever take them off again.

Dear Haircurl:

My boyfriend likes to run his fingers through my hair. The trouble is he keeps getting them pinched in my rollers. The other night a terribly embarrassing episode happened. We were at the movies and somehow my boyfriend got two of his fingers caught (it was right where the medium roller meets the clip-curl) and couldn’t get them out. I felt very conspicuous leaving the theater with his hand still in my hair, and going home on the bus several people gave us “funny looks.” Fortunately I was able to reach my stylist at home and he came right over with his tools and got poor Jerry loose. Jerry was very mad and said he’s not going to date me again until I get some rollers that don’t have this particular habit. I think he is being unfair, but he “means business.” Can you help me?

Frantic

Buffalo

Dear Frantic Buffalo:

We’re sorry to have to tell you that no rollers have yet been developed that do not occasionally catch the fingers of boys who tousle. The roller industry, however, is working very hard on the problem, as this complaint frequently comes up. Meanwhile why not ask Jerry to wear mittens? That way you’ll be happy and he’ll be safe.

There were many more, and perhaps I even made a small contribution to Lady Bird Johnson’s “beautification” program. But the point is this: once you’ve read that article you can never look at hair curlers in the same way again. You’ve been jolted by humor into looking with a fresh eye at something bizarre in our daily environment that was previously taken for granted. The subject here isn’t important—hair curlers won’t be the ruin of our society. But the method will work for subjects that are important, or for almost any subject, if you can find the right comic frame.

Over the last five years of the old Life, 1968-1972, I used humor to get at a number of unlikely subjects, such as the excesses of military power and nuclear testing. One column was on the petty squabbling over the shape of the table at the Vietnam peace conference in Paris. The situation had become so outrageous after nine weeks that it could be approached only through ridicule, and I described various efforts to get peace at my own dinner table by changing its shape every night, or by lowering the chairs of different people to give them less “status,” or by turning their chairs around so the rest of us wouldn’t have to “recognize” them. It was exactly what was happening in Paris.

What made those pieces work was that they stuck close to the form they were parodying. Humor may seem to be an act of gross exaggeration. But the hair curler letters wouldn’t succeed if we didn’t recognize them as a specific journalistic form, both in their style and in their mentality. Control is vital to humor. Don’t use comical names like Throttlebottom. Don’t make the same kind of joke two or three times—readers will enjoy themselves more if you make it only once. Trust the sophistication of readers who do know what you’re doing, and don’t worry about the rest.

The columns that I wrote for Life made people laugh. But they had a serious purpose, which was to say: “Something crazy is going on here—some erosion in the quality of life, or some threat to fife itself, and yet everyone assumes it’s normal.” Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it’s still outlandish.

I remember a cartoon by Bill Mauldin during the student turmoil of the late 1960s, when infantrymen and tanks were summoned to keep peace at a college in North Carolina and undergraduates at Berkeley were dispersed by a helicopter spraying them with Mace. The cartoon showed a mother pleading with her son’s draft board: “He’s an only child—please get him off the campus.” It was Mauldin’s way of pinning down this particular lunacy, and he was right on target—in fact, at the center of the bull’s-eye, as the killing of four students at Kent State University proved not long after his cartoon appeared.

The targets will change from week to week, but there will never be a dearth of new lunacies and dangers for the humorist to fight. Lyndon Johnson, in the years of his disastrous war in Vietnam, was brought down partly by Jules Feiffer and Art Buchwald. Senator Joseph McCarthy and Vice-President Spiro Agnew were brought down partly by Walt Kelly in the comic strip Pogo. H. L. Mencken brought down a whole galaxy of hypocrites in high places, and “Boss” Tweed of Tammany Hall was partly toppled by the cartoons of Thomas Nast. Mort Sahl, a comic, was the only person who stayed awake during the Eisenhower years, when America was under sedation and didn’t want to be disturbed. Many people regarded Sahl as a cynic, but he thought of himself as an idealist. “If I criticize somebody,” he said, “it’s because I have higher hopes for the world, something good to replace the bad. I’m not saying what the Beat Generation says: ’Go away because I’m not involved.’ I’m here and I’m involved.”

“I’m here and I’m involved”: make that your creed if you want to write serious humor. Humorists operate on a deeper current than most people suspect. They must be willing to go against the grain, to say what the populace and the President may not want to hear. Art Buchwald and Garry Trudeau perform an act of courage every week. They say things that need to be said that a regular columnist couldn’t get away with. What saves them is that politicians are not known for humor and are therefore even more befuddled by it than the general public.

But humor has many uses besides the topical. They aren’t as urgent, but they help us to look at far older problems of the heart, the home, the family, the job and all the other frustrations of just getting from morning to night. I once interviewed Chic Young, creator of Blondie, when he had been writing and drawing that daily and Sunday comic strip for 40 years, or 14,500 strips. It was the most popular of all strips, reaching 60 million readers in every comer of the world, and I asked Young why it was so durable.

“It’s durable because it’s simple,” he said. “Its built on four things that everybody does: sleeping, eating, raising a family and making money.” The comic variations on those four themes are as numerous in the strip as they are in life. Dagwoods efforts to get money from his boss, Mr. Dithers, have their perpetual counterweight in Blondie’s efforts to spend it. “I try to keep Dagwood in a world that people are used to,” Young told me. “He never does anything as special as playing golf, and the people who come to the door are just the people that an average family has to deal with.”

I cite Young’s four themes to remind you that most humor, however freakish it may seem, is based on fundamental truths. Humor is not a separate organism that can survive on its own frail metabolism. It’s a special angle of vision granted to certain writers who already write good English. They aren’t writing about life that’s essentially ludicrous; they are writing about life that’s essentially serious, but their eye falls on areas where serious hopes are mocked by some ironic turn of fate—“the strange incongruity,” as Stephen Leacock put it, “between our aspiration and our achievement.” E. B. White made the same point. “I don’t like the word ’humorist,’” he said. “It seems to me misleading. Humor is a by-product that occurs in the serious work of some and not others. I was more influenced by Don Marquis than by Ernest Hemingway, by Perelman than by Dreiser.”

Therefore I suggest several principles for the writer of humor. Master the craft of writing good “straight” English; humorists from Mark Twain to Russell Baker are, first of all,

superb writers. Don’t search for the outlandish and scorn what seems too ordinary; you will touch more chords by finding what’s funny in what you know to be true. Finally, don’t strain for laughs; humor is built on surprise, and you can surprise the reader only so often.

Unfortunately for writers, humor is elusive and subjective. No two people think the same things are funny, and a piece that one magazine will reject as a dud is often published by another that finds it a jewel. The reasons for rejection are equally elusive. “It just doesn’t work,” editors say, and there’s not much they can add. Occasionally such a piece can be made to work— it has some flaw that can be repaired. Mortality, however, is high. “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can,” E. B. White once wrote, “but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

I’m no fancier of dead frogs, but I wanted to see if at least a few lessons could be learned by poking about in the innards, and when I was teaching at Yale I decided, one year, to teach a course in humor writing. I warned my students that possibly it couldn’t be done and that we might end up killing the thing we loved. Luckily, humor not only didn’t die; it bloomed in the desert of solemn term papers, and I repeated the course the following year. Let me briefly reconstruct our journey.

“I hope to point out that American humor has an honorable literature,” I wrote in a memo for prospective students, “and to consider the influence of certain pioneers on their successors.... Although the line between ’fiction’ and ’nonfiction’ is fuzzy in humor, I see this as a nonfiction course: what you write will be based on external events. I’m not interested in ’creative writing,’ flights of pure imagination and pointless whimsy.”

I began by reading excerpts from early writers to show that a humorist can employ a wide range of literary forms, or invent new ones. We started with George Ade’s “Fables in Slang,” the first of which appeared in 1897 in the Chicago Record, where Ade was a reporter. “He was just sitting unsuspectingly in front of a sheet of paper,” Jean Shepherd writes in a fine introduction to his anthology, The America of George Ade, “when the innocent idea came to him to write something in fable form, using the language and the cliches of the moment. In other words, slang. To let people know that he knew better than to use slang in writing, he decided to capitalize all suspicious words and phrases. He was mortally afraid people would think he was illiterate.”

He needn’t have worried; by 1900 the Fables were so popular that he was earning $1,000 a week. Here’s “The Fable of the Subordinate Who Saw a Great Light”:

Once there was an Еmрlоуe who was getting the Nub End of the Deal. He kicked on the long Hours and the small Salary, and helped to organize a Clerks’ Protective Association. He was for the Toiler as against the Main Squeeze.

To keep him simmered down, the Owners gave him an Interest. After that he began to perspire when he looked at the Pay-Roll, and it did seem to him that a lot of big, lazy Lummixes were standing around the shop doing the Soldier Act. He learned to snap his Fingers every time the Office Boy giggled. As for the faithful old Book-Keeper who wanted an increase to $9 and a week’s Vacation in the Summer, the best he got was a little Talk about Contentment being a Jewel.

The saddest moment of the Day for him was when the whole Bunch knocked off at 6 o’clock in the Evening. It seemed a Shame to call 10 Hours a Full Day. As for the Saturday Half-Holiday Movement, that was little better than Highway Robbery. Those who formerly slaved alongside of him in the Galleys had to address him as Mister, and he had them numbered the same as Convicts.

One day an Underling ventured to remind the Slave-Driver that once he had been the Friend of the Salaried Minion.

“Right you are,” said the Boss. “But when I plugged for the lowly Wage-Earner I never had been in the Directors’ Office to see the beautiful Tableau entitled ’Virtue copping out the Annual Dividend.’ I don’t know that I can make the situation clear to you, so I will merely remark that all those who get on our side of the Fence are enabled to catch a new Angle on this Salary Question.”

Moral: For Educational Purposes, every Employe should be taken into the Firm.

The universal truth in that hundred-year-old gem is still true today, as it is in almost all the Fables. “Ade was my first influence as a humorist,” S. J. Perelman told me. “He had a social sense of history. His pictures of Hoosier fife at the turn of the century are more documentary than any of those studies on how much people paid for their coal. His humor was rooted in a perception of people and places. He had a cutting edge and an acerbic wit that no earlier American humorist had.”

From Ade I proceeded to Ring Lardner, author of the classic fine “Shut up, he explained,” partly to demonstrate that dramatic dialogue is another form that can serve the humorist. I’m a pushover for Lardner’s nonsense plays, which he presumably wrote just to amuse himself. But he was also lampooning the holy conventions of playwriting, in which yards of italic type are used to establish what’s happening onstage. Act I of Lardner’s I Gaspiri (The Upholsterers) consists of ten lines of dialogue, none of it involving the listed characters, and nine fines of irrelevant italic, concluding with “The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week.” In his career Lardner would put humor to powerful use in many literary forms, such as the baseball novel, You Know Me, Al. His ear was perfectly tuned to American piety and self-delusion.

Next I resurrected Archy and Mehitabel, by Don Marquis, to show that this influential humorist also used an unorthodox

medium—doggerel—for his message. Marquis, a columnist for the New York Sun, stumbled on a novel solution to the newspaperman’s brutal problem of meeting a deadline and presenting his material in orderly prose, just as Ade stumbled on the fable. In 1916 he created the cockroach Archy, who banged out free verse on Marquiss typewriter at night, minus capital letters because he wasn’t strong enough to press the shift key. Archy’s poems, describing his friendship with a cat named Mehitabel, are of a philosophical bent that one wouldn’t guess from their ragged appearance. No formal essay could more thoroughly deflate the aging actors who bemoan the current state of the theater than Marquis does in “The Old Trouper,” a long poem in which Archy describes Mehitabel’s meeting with an old theater cat named Tom:

 i come of a long line

 of theatre cats

 my grandfather

 was with forrest

 he had it he was a real trouper...

Marquis was using the cat to leaven his impatience with a type of bore he knew well. It’s a universal impatience, whatever the category of old-timer, just as it’s a universal trait of old-timers to complain that their field has gone to the dogs. Marquis achieves one of the classic functions of humor: to deflect anger into a channel where we can laugh at frailty instead of railing against it.

The next writers on my tour were Donald Ogden Stewart, Robert Benchley and Frank Sullivan, who greatly broadened the possibilities of “free association” humor. Benchley added a dimension of warmth and vulnerability that wasn’t present in humorists like Ade and Marquis, who ducked into impersonal forms like fable and doggerel, where they could hide. Nobody is better than Benchley at diving headlong into his subject:

St. Francis of Assisi (unless I am getting him mixed up with St. Simeon Stylites, which might be very easy to do as both their names begin with “St.”) was very fond of birds, and often had his picture taken with them sitting on his shoulders and pecking at his wrists. That was all right, if St. Francis liked it. We all have our likes and dislikes, and I have more of a feeling for dogs.

Perhaps they were all just paving the way for S. J. Perelman. If so, Perelman gratefully acknowledged the debt. “You must learn by imitation,” he said. “I could have been arrested for imitating Lardner in my pieces in the late 1920s—not the content, but the manner. These influences gradually fall away.”

His own influence hasn’t been so easily shed. At his death in 1979 he had been writing steadily for more than half a century, putting the language through breathtaking loops, and the woods are still full of writers and comics who were drawn into the gravitational pull of his style and never quite got back out. It doesn’t take a detective to see Perelman’s hand not only in writers like Woody Allen but in the BBC’s Goon Show and Monty Python, in the radio skits of Bob and Ray, and in the glancing wit of Groucho Marx—an influence more easily traceable because Perelman wrote several of the Marx Brothers’ early movies.

What he created was an awareness that when the writer’s mind works by free association it can ricochet from the normal to the absurd and, by the unexpectedness of its angle, demolish whatever trite idea had been there before. Onto this element of constant surprise he grafted the dazzling wordplay that was his trademark, a rich and recondite vocabulary, and an erudition based on reading and travel.

But even that mixture wouldn’t have sustained him if he hadn’t had a target. “All humor must be about something—it must touch concretely on life,” he said, and although readers savoring his style may lose sight of his motive, some form of pomposity lies in ruins at the end of a Perelman piece, just as grand opera never quite recovered from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera or banking from W. C. Fields’s The Bank Dick. He was seldom at a loss for charlatans and knaves, especially in the worlds of Broadway, Hollywood, advertising and merchandising.

I still remember the teenage moment when I first got hit by one of Perelman’s sentences. His sentences were unlike any I had ever seen, and they fractured me:

The whistle shrilled and in a moment I was chugging out of Grand Central’s dreaming spires. I had chugged only a few feet when I realized that I had left without the train, so I had to run back and wait for it to start... . With only two hours in Chicago I would be unable to see the city, and the thought drew me into a state of composure. I noted with pleasure that a fresh coat of grime had been given to the Dearborn Street station, though I was hardly vain enough to believe that it had anything to do with my visit.

Women loved this impetual Irish adventurer who would rather fight than eat and vice-versa. One night he was chafing at The Bit, a tavern in Portsmouth, when he overheard a chance remark from a brawny gunner’s mate in his cups. ... The following morning the “Maid of Hull,” a frigate of the line mounting 36 guns, out of Bath and into bed in a twinkling, dropped downstream on the tide, bound for Bombay, object matrimony. On her as passenger went my great-grandfather. . . . Fifty-three days later, living almost entirely on cameo brooches and the ptarmigan which fell to the ptrigger of his pfowling piece, he at last sighted the towers of Ishpeming, the Holy City of the Surds and Cosines, fanatical Mohammedan warrior sects.

My classroom survey ended with Woody Allen, the most cerebral practitioner of the trade. Allens magazine pieces, now collected in several books, constitute a body of written humor unique for being both intellectual and hilarious, probing not only his well-known themes of death and anxiety but such overbearing academic disciplines and literary forms as philosophy, psychology, drama, Irish poetry and the explication of texts (“Hassidic Tales”). “A Look at Organized Crime,” a parody of all the articles ever written explaining the Mafia, is one of the funniest pieces I know, and “The Schmeed Memoirs”—the recollections of Hitlers barber—is the ultimate jab at the “good German” who was just doing his job:

I have been asked if I was aware of the moral implications of what I was doing. As I told the tribunal at Nuremberg, I did not know that Hitler was a Nazi. The truth was that for years I thought he worked for the phone company. When I finally did find out what a monster he was, it was too late to do anything, as I had made a down payment on some furniture. Once, toward the end of the war, I did contemplate loosening the Fiihrer’s neck-napkin and allowing some tiny hairs to get down his back, but at the last minute my nerve failed me.

The brief excerpts in this chapter can convey only a glimmer of the vast output and artistry of these giants. But I wanted my students to know that they were working within a long tradition of serious intent and considerable nerve, one that is still alive in the work of such writers as Ian Frazier, Garrison Keillor, Fran Lebowitz, Nora Ephron, Calvin Trillin and Mark Singer. Singer is the current star in a long lineage of New Yorker writers—St. Clair McKelway, Robert Lewis Taylor, Lillian Ross, Wolcott Gibbs—who used deadpan humor to assassinate such public nuisances as Walter Winchell, leaving hardly a mark where their stiletto broke the skin.

Singer’s lethal potion is concocted of hundreds of outlandish facts and quotes—he is a tenacious reporter—and a style that barely suppresses his own amusement. It works particularly well on the egregious buccaneers of the late 1990s who have long tried the patience of the citizenry, as proved by his profile in The New Yorker of the developer Donald Trump. Noting that Trump “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul,” Singer describes a visit to Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach spa converted by Trump from the 118-room Hispano-Moorish-Venetian mansion built in the 1920s by Marjorie Merriweather Post and E. F. Hutton:

Evidently, Trump’s philosophy of wellness is rooted in a belief that prolonged exposure to exceptionally attractive young spa attendants will instill in the male clientele a will to live. Accordingly, he limits his role to a pocket veto of key hiring decisions. While giving me a tour of the main exercise room, where Tony Bennett, who does a couple of gigs at Mara-Lago each season and had been designated an “artist-in- residence,” was taking a brisk walk on a treadmill, Trump introduced me to “our resident physician, Dr. Ginger Lee Southall”—a recent chiropractic-college graduate. As Dr. Ginger, out of earshot, manipulated the sore back of a grateful member, I asked Trump where she had done her training. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Baywatch Medical School? Does that sound right? I’ll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger’s photograph, I didn’t really need to look at her resume or anyone else’s. Are you asking, ’Did we hire her because she trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years?’ The answer is no. And I’ll tell you why: because by the time she’s spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don’t want to look at her.”

Of all the current humorists, Garrison Keillor has the surest eye for social change and the most inventive mind for making his point obliquely. Again and again he gives us the pleasure of finding an old genre dressed up in new clothes. Americas current hostility to cigarette smokers is a trend that any alert writer might have noticed and written about with due sobriety. This approach, however, is pure Keillor:

The last cigarette smokers in America were located in a box canyon south of Donner Pass in the High Sierra by two federal tobacco agents in a helicopter who spotted the little smoke puffs just before noon. One of them, the district chief, called in the ground team by air-to-ground radio. Six men in camouflage outfits, members of a crack antismoking joggers unit, moved quickly across the rugged terrain, surrounded the bunch in their hideout, subdued them with tear gas, and made them lie face down on the gravel in the hot August sun. There were three females and two males, all in their mid-forties. They had been on the run since the adoption of the Twenty-eighth Amendment.

The genre that’s in Keillor’s head has been a staple of American newspapers since the Dillinger era of the 1930s, and his enjoyment of that form, with its echoes of gangsters and G-men, of stakeouts and shootouts, is obvious in his writing.

Another situation that Keillor obviously enjoyed having found a perfect framework for was the Bush administrations bailout of the savings-and-loan industry. This is how his piece “How the Savings and Loans Were Saved” begins:

The President was playing badminton in Aspen the day vast hordes of barbaric Huns invaded Chicago, and a reporter whose aunt lives in Evanston shouted to him as he headed for the clubhouse, “The Huns are wreaking carnage in Chicago, Mr. President! Any comment?”

Mr. Bush, though caught off guard by news of the invasion, said, “We’re following that whole Hun situation very closely, and right now it looks encouraging, but I’m hoping we can get back to you in a few hours with something more definite.” The President appeared concerned but relaxed and definitely chin-up and in charge.

The piece goes on to describe how rapacious barbarians swarmed into the city, “burned churches and performing-arts centers and historic restorations, and dragged away monks, virgins and associate professors.. . to be sold into slavery” and seized the savings-and-loan offices, provoking no action by President Bush, however, because “exit polling at shopping malls showed that people thought he was handling it O.K.”

The President decided not to interfere with the takeover attempts in the savings-and-loan industry and to pay the hundred and sixty-six billion dollars, not as a ransom of any type but as ordinary government support, plain and simple, nothing irregular about it, and the Huns and the Vandals rode away, carrying their treasure with them, and the Goths sailed away up Lake Michigan.

Keillor’s satire left me full of admiration—first for an act of humor so original, but also for expressing the citizen outrage I hadn’t found a way to express. All I had been able to muster was helpless anger that my grandchildren in their old age would still be paying for Bushs rescue of the industry that the greedy hordes had plundered.

But there’s no law that says humor has to make a point. Pure nonsense is a joy forever, as Keats didn’t quite say. I love to see a writer flying high, just for the hell of it. The following two excerpts, from recent pieces by Ian Frazier and John Updike, are 100 percent off-the-wall; nothing written during America’s earlier golden ages was any funnier. Fraziers piece is called “Dating Your Mom,” and it begins like this:

In today’s fast-moving, transient, rootless society, where people meet and make love and part without ever really touching, the relationship every guy already has with his own mother is too valuable to ignore. Here is a grown, experienced, loving woman—one you do not have to go to a party or a singles bar to meet, one you do not have to go to great lengths to get to know. There are hundreds of times when you and your mother are thrown together naturally, without the tension that usually accompanies courtship—just the two of you, alone. All you need is a little presence of mind to take advantage of these situations. Say your mom is driving you downtown in the car to buy you a new pair of slacks. First, find a nice station on the car radio, one that she likes. Get into the pleasant lull of freeway driving—tires humming along the pavement, air conditioner on max. Then turn to look at her across the front seat and say something like, “You know, you’ve really kept your shape, Mom, and don’t think I haven’t noticed.” Or suppose she comes into your room to bring you some clean socks. Take her by the wrist, pull her close, and say, “Mom, you’re the most fascinating woman I’ve ever met.” Probably she’ll tell you to cut out the foolishness, but I can guarantee you one thing: she will never tell your dad. Possibly she would find it hard to say, “Dear, Piper just made a pass at me,” or possibly she is secretly flattered, but whatever the reason, she will keep it to herself until the day comes when she is no longer ashamed to tell the world of your love.

Updikes piece, “Glad Rags,” though no less an act of bungee-jumping, bringing him within inches of the rocks at the bottom of the gorge, has a disturbing core of reality. Not only does it flirt with some of the nation s darker suppositions about J. Edgar Hoover; it deals with high-ranking Americans of recent memory—a sainted President and his cabinet. What makes it work, for all its seeming frivolity, is Updikes meticulous research. You can bet that all the details—names, dates and fashion terminology—are correct:

To those of us who were alive and sartorially active at the time, it was saddening to read in the Boston Globe recently the allegation, by “New York socialite” Susan Rosenstiel, that in 1958 J. Edgar Hoover was parading around in a Plaza Hotel suite wearing womens clothes: “He was wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings and high heels, and a black curly wig.” I was saddened to think that future generations, trying to grasp the peculiar splendor and excitement of high-echelon cross-dressing during Eisenhowers second term, will imagine that dowdy bit of black fluff, with its fussy flounces and matching wig, to have been tres a la mode, when the truth is we all considered J. Edgar something of a frump.

Ike, for instance, dear Ike with his infallible instincts, would never have let himself be caught in lace stockings, even though he did have the legs for them. I remember, within a month of Saint Laurent s 1958 collection for Dior, Ike coming out in a stunning cobalt-blue wool trapeze, with white open- backed heels and a false chignon. That very day, if memory serves, he had sent five thousand marines to Lebanon, and not a hair out of place. It was with this outfit—or was it a belted A-line from the previous year?—that he sported a flowered silk neck cloth, when scarves were still thought to be strictly for babushkas. He was very conservative as to hemlines, however; when Saint Laurent lifted skirts to the knee in 1959, the President waited three months for Congress to decide the issue, and then, losing all patience, switched to Balenciaga with a stroke of his pen. Thenceforth, to the very end of his administration, he stuck with long-waisted day dresses in neutral duns and beiges.

John Foster Dulles, on the other hand, favored a slinky- pajama look and pastel pants suits with a touch of glimmer in the fabric. Oodles of bangles, upswept blond wigs, and pompommed mules. Despite his staunch anti-Communism, he was oddly partial to red, though I believe on good authority that Sherman Adams at least once took Foster aside and made the point that bright colors did not become a big-boned frame. Sherman, though he was undone by vicuna, lingers in my minds eye as a creature of whimsical ostrich-feather boas and enchantments in lightly starched lemon voile. ...

Enjoyment, finally, is what all humorists must convey—the idea that they are having a terrific time, and this notion of cranked-up audacity is what I wanted my Yale students to grapple with. At first I told them to write in one of the existing humor forms—satire, parody, lampoon, etc.—and not to use “I” or to write from their own experience. I assigned the same topic to the whole class, bringing in some absurdity I had noticed in the newspaper. The students jumped boldly into free association, surrealism and nonsense. They found that it was possible to slip off the chains of logic and have fun making a serious point within a given humor form. They were heavily under the influence of Woody Allens non sequiturs (“For this the Rabbi bashes his head in, which, according to the Torah, is one of the most subtle methods of showing concern”).

After about four weeks, fatigue set in. The students learned that they were capable of writing humor. But they had also learned how tiring it is to sustain a weekly act of comic invention, writing in other voices. It was time to slow down their metabolism—to start them writing in their own voice, about their own lives. I declared a moratorium on Woody Allen and said I would tell them when they could read him again. That day never came.

I adopted the Chic Young principle—stick to what you know—and began to read from writers who use humor as a vein that runs quietly through their work. One piece was E. B. Whites “The Eye of Edna,” in which White recalls waiting on his Maine farm for the arrival of Hurricane Edna while listening for several days to inane radio reports of its progress. Its a perfect essay, full of wisdom and gentle wit.

Another writer whose work I excavated was Stephen Leacock, a Canadian. I recalled him from my boyhood as hilarious but was afraid that, as often happens in looking up old friends, he would turn out to be merely “comical.” His pieces, however, had survived the erosion of time, and one that I particularly remembered—“My Financial Career,” in which he tries to open a bank account with $56—still seems the model piece of humor on how rattled we all become when dealing with banks, libraries and other uptight institutions. Rereading Leacock reminded me that another function of the humorist is to represent himself as the victim or dunce, helpless in most situations. Its therapy for readers, enabling them to feel superior to the writer, or at least to identify with a fellow victim. A humorist who deals with ordinary life never runs out of materia), as Erma Bombeck enjoyably proved over many decades.

So that was the direction in which our Yale humor class began to move. Many of the students wrote about their families. We ran into problems, mainly of exaggeration, and gradually solved them, trying to achieve control, cutting the extra sentence that explains a funny point that is already implicit. A hard decision was to know how much exaggeration was allowable and how much was too much. One student wrote a funny piece about what a terrible cook his grandmother was. When I praised it he said she was really a very good cook. I said I was sorry to hear it—somehow the piece now seemed less funny. He asked if that made a difference. I said it didn’t make a difference in this piece, since I had enjoyed it without knowing it was untrue, but that I thought he would last longer if he started from the truth rather than from invention—surely one secret of James Thurber s longevity as a major American humorist. In Thurber s “The Night the Bed Fell” we know that he has slightly enlarged the facts. But we also know that something happened to the bed that night in the attic.

In short, our class began by striving first for humor and hoping to wing a few truths along the way. We ended by striving for truth and hoping to add humor along the way. Ultimately we realized that the two are intertwined.