The Best Humor Annual – Edited by Louis Untermeyer & Ralph E. Shikes, 1952 ★

Laffs on Not Quite Every Page

Read some old books, and you wonder what they ever did to deserve consignment to a quick obscurity. Other old books show Father Time tough but fair. Take this exhaustive but underwhelming compendium of humorous writings published in 1951-1952.

The 35 writers assembled here include recognized comedy masters like P. G. Wodehouse, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, and Al Capp. Also present: newspaper critics, screenwriters, even a future National Security Advisor. Given the talent level, and my nostalgia for mid-century American culture, I had hopes this would be amusing.

Instead it proved a point I have found myself making on this blog, how the past is another country:

Intelligent she was not. In fact, she veered in the opposite direction. But I believed that under my guidance she would smarten up. At any rate, it was worth a try. It is, after all, easier to make a beautiful dumb girl smart than to make an ugly smart girl beautiful.

That’s from the first piece collected here, Max Shulman’s “Love Is A Fallacy,” about college boy Dobie Gillis’s search for romance by way of Pygmalion. It is a hoary, cliché-ridden tale of male chauvinism, and not all that funny, yet still the best piece in the book.

Max Shulman's Dobie Gillis became the basis for a television series that launched Tuesday Weld, Warren Beatty, and Bob Denver into stardom. "Love Is A Fallacy" is taken from the short-story collection that introduced the character, The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis. Image from https://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/tag/max-shulman/

Shulman has a way with a snappy line, but also builds narrative and delivers a smooth ending that lingers. That’s unique talent; just how unique is revealed by the rest of the book.

Two other solid pieces emerge from the chaff, both short stories. “The Weather Prophet,” is by Dillon Anderson, later to become our country’s second-ever national security advisor. In his spare time, he wrote of a pair of Texas ne’er-do-wells featured here. Like all the other writings here, it is not hilarious but at least engages and amuses, as when the pair find themselves on a yacht in the middle of a hurricane:

“Two halves of a hurricane is all they is, ain’t they?” Claudie asked once between gusts.

“Certainly, Claudie,” I told him. “You got that far in arithmetic, I know.”

More engaging, if less amusing, is Hazel Heckman’s “The Quarter-pound Loss;” recounting the byplay between a Kansas storekeeper and a patron whose shiftless husband is running for office: “Putting road funds into the hands of a man like Tom Summers would be like dropping a dead cat into a flock of vultures. They’d have its bones picked before you could say the Ten Commandments!”

Other pieces are short stories, too. There are also personal reminiscences, sports columns, news bulletins, a parody of James Jones’ best-selling novel From Here To Eternity, a script from a make-believe movie. It should make for a splendid variety of comedy, especially given the pedigree of the writers; luminaries from the staffs of The New Yorker and Collier’s magazines, the A.V. Clubs of their day. The end result is like being stuck in traffic.

The biggest names register some of the fattest disappointments. James Thurber contributes an essay, “What’s So Funny?” in the form of a letter to a female admirer who wants to write comedy prose, too. After dishing on the many ways women fail in this regard, Thurber signs off: “Why don’t you become a bacteriologist, or a Red Cross nurse, or a Wave, like all the other girls?”

S. J. Perelman was admired as both a humorist and as a scriptwriter to the Marx Brothers. His “Week End With Groucho Marx,” shows him to poor effect in both departments, as he recalls a summons to Hollywood from Groucho:

“Then why not fly out for a couple of days with me – at your own expense, of course? If you want to see unspoiled, primitive people, we’ve got some here who’ve just begun to walk erect.”

Most devastating for me was the inclusion of Bob & Ray. Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding are longtime comedy heroes of mine, and this book includes a rare chance at reading an essay from them, rather than a script from one of their many radio shows.

Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, the two and only. Their work in prose form was usually sharper than it appears in the Best Humor Annual; try to find their occasional essays in vintage 1950s issues of MAD magazine. Image from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/walking-up-lexington-avenue-with-bob-and-ray.

Their “Amanda Of Mental Therapy” explains an idea for a soap opera bearing the title, sending up assorted daytime-drama tropes in a manner devoid of their usual sly, subversive delivery. They just force the humor instead, in a way that comes off lame.

Amanda’s little sister Cathy, who is stoically enduring a series of radium treatments for dry scalp, is going to have a b-a-b-y. Now it should be noted that the locale of a serial is the one place in the world where it can take a baby 16 to 20 months to be born.

If you want to know something of the social character of middle-class American life at the dawn of the Eisenhower era, The Best Humor Annual provides useful insights on first-world problems of the day. There is a piece about a boy too rapt in his reading to come for dinner; the varied challenges of weekend house guests; and the spiritual drain of that new medium, television.

As weak as these pieces are, the manner in which they are presented is worse. Introductions of each author assure us of their inherent funniness and social salubrity in a pompous, almost-sermonizing manner:

The climate is not propitious for experiments in fun-making, critical or even uncritical wit. But humor is a particularly hardy perennial and will persist in bursting forth as long as men – and women – are not afraid to laugh.

Three Best Humor Annuals in all were published, one each year beginning in 1950. This was the last of them, and apparently produced under some duress. Lead compiler Louis T. Untermeyer had just been blacklisted, explaining the above comment about a not-propitious climate. In 1951, he had been kicked off his place on the panel of popular game show “What’s My Line,” replaced by another humor-book compiler, Bennett Cerf.

Comedy, thy name is Untermeyer. A tireless publisher of compilations ranging from children's stories to erotic poetry, Louis Untermeyer's problems with the House Un-American Activities Committee made him an unlikely victim of the Red Scare. His story is told well in the Sweet Freedom blog here. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Untermeyer.

Nothing subversive about this edition of Best Humor Annual; everything is played too much on the square. You get a middling story about golf from P. G. Wodehouse (“No writer of our day has provoked so many gasps of incredulity – and so many gargantuan and grateful laughs,” his introduction reads), a selection of arid non-sequiturs from Frank Sullivan, and a dreary explanation of one-upsmanship from Stephen Potter’s series of send-ups on British manners played to much better effect in a later film treatment of his work, School For Scoundrels:

If you have nothing to say, or, rather, something extremely stupid and obvious, say it, but in a “plonking” tone of voice – i. e. roundly, but hollowly and diplomatically. It is possible, for instance, to take up and repeat with slight variation, in this tone of voice, the last phrase of the speaker.

There is a clear delineation to be made between the words “humor” and “wit.” Humor is about making the reader laugh, wit is about making the writer look clever. There is little actual humor, and much wit, to be found in The Best Humor Annual; some of that wit too witty for its own good. Take John Collier in “Season Of Mists,” please:

I entered the bar in jaunty style, my mouth already writhing with a classy catch-phrase, like the eye socket of a provincial actor (but all actors are provincial) in travail with his waggish monocle.

The one dominant theme, and most fascinating takeaway, from this book is the power dynamic it delineates between women and men. It constantly comes up, a prevailing sense of male frustration with their wives, one almost entirely devoid of sex and love and concerned more with who wears the pants in the house.

Charles W. Morton’s “Can Husbands Be Taught?” sets the tone in explaining the challenge about providing for one’s spouse emotionally as well as materially:

The strange thing is that the husband has absolutely no place to go for advice about all this. He certainly can’t expect his wife to explain it to him. That would be much like expecting Notre Dame to explain to Michigan what the next play would be.

Robert T. Allen goes further on this theme, in “Women Have No Sense Of Humor:”

There’s another reason why things often go flat when a man tries to make a woman laugh. It’s not the joke that’s wrong, but the fact that a man is telling it. A woman thinks a man is funny most of the time, although she rarely lets him know.

Women writers discuss this, too, though their thoughts on the matter seem almost as toxic from our remove in time. Mary Anne Cameron’s short story “A Spring Motif” has a teenage girl’s crush on a boy explained as the result of a scrap they had when they were children: “When she tasted his blood, something happened to her.”

That amused me; too bad the rest of her story trails off like most of the other pieces meant for quick waiting-room reads and nothing else. It’s a persistent problem that this collection of one-liners and drolleries, removed from their frameworks in time, come off like orphans in the storm, wanly flailing for attention as they are swept from view.

Humor shouldn’t be so sad. I have a few more of these old humor books in my collection; I doubt I will ever read any of them now.