Laughter on the Air

THERE are several ways to empty a Hall of Entertainment. One is the smell of smoke. Another is a Lecture. Most purgent of the lectures is the Lecture on the Sense of Humor. A trained comedian practicing his trade will hold his audience as long as he likes. When they wrote Artemus Ward to play one hundred nights at the opera house in Virginia City they asked him what he would take. He wired back “Brandy and Soda” and a fat fee. For telling seasoned gags to a hard, cheerful capacity-house of miners and tarts for two hours a night he earned and was paid his princely fee in silver. If, instead of hosing down his audience with tried material, he had undertaken a Lecture on the subject of What Is Funny, he would have been shot, and his murderer would have spent eight months in the local jug. Eight months, Mark Twain said, was the maximum sentence. So if you want to empty the auditorium, just dissect humor, or One Man’s Meat.

Take Carlyle. Not a bad writer. Not bad reading, either, until he says: —

“True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper. It is a sort of inverse sublimity, exalting, as it were, into our affections what is below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what is above us.”

Oh.

Try that on your radio audience.

Take Carlyle, as we said. Free. Or take Max Eastman. One afternoon he was chewing a pencil, and planchette wrote on the paper before him the words “The . . . Enjoyment . . . of . . . Laughter.” Ha, he said mirthlessly. Taking the pencil out of his mouth he wrote one of the longer and duller books. It tried to take the Sense of Humor apart. It even contained a macabre passage telling what made Chaplin’s pantomime funny. And how is your inverse sublimity?

So, Dear Reader, avoid all books, lectures, and unillustrated discussions of humor. Avoid all traffic with humor except the McCoy. Avoid especially written and printed commentaries like this one.

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Now, will those who have decided to remain in the room please turn on the radio?

In an earlier scolding, we noted that a great many other people beside ourselves, totaling some thirty million American families, listen to the radio too. We know that, what they like and do not like is measured with a certain degree of reliability.

What do you suppose they like?

They like laughs. They like laughs best of all, war or peace, summer or winter, wet or dry.

Of the most popular programs on the air, the majority base on comedy. A noteworthy exception is the Lux radio theater, but it does not bar humor. Not classified as comedy are the various quiz affairs, though they are always tragicomic, depending on how superior you feel or how much you crave an Encyc. Brit, or a tube of Mollé. Up there on the shoulders of Mount Whitney, among the vastly popular radio programs, you will find that the American public at this moment likes best of all the crisp drollery-in-adversity of Mr. Fibber McGee and his goodwife Molly. “Not funny, McGee!” has become an ominous and prophetic national password.

Mr. Benny, Mr. Hope, Mr. Allen, Mr. Crosby, Mr. Burns, Mr. and Mrs. Burns, the Messrs. Bergen and McCarthy, Mr. Skelton, Miss Brice, Master H. Aldrich and his father and mother, Mr. Marx (G.), Mr. Jolson and his leafy friend Mr. Woolley, Mr. Cantor, Mr. and Mrs. Ace, Mr. Gardner — or must we go on? — amass a total of active and rollicking listening which would have brought an envying and understanding smile to the faces of Editor Lowell, Editor Perry, Editor Howells and his correspondent Sam Clemens. Oddly enough, however, the humor which these radio masters dispense causes the moralists, the sociologists, the low-radio-rat ing professors, and the self-appointed analysts of radio to Mew With Alarm.

The fact is that radio has endowed the words of good nature with a force generally unmanageable by the jockeys of printed text written in the traditional cadence. The laughs written for the radio are mostly not written by the lads anointed by the Book-of-the-Month Club. The writer of “Vic and Sade” has broken more dates with publishers and syndicates and movie scouts than a writing man could conjure in his prettiest trance, and because why? Because all he wants to do is to be let alone to write a. good daily “Vic and Sade.” That it happens to be as neat and savory human nature and native humor as anything ever set down on paper may be his purpose or his superstition, but there the fact is.

The material written for Mr. Benny, who in 17 minutes of the 10,080 in each week refreshes the confidence of some thirty-five million American people in him as a generous slow-wit and tightwad, and as the fortunate friend of a man named Rochester, is transcribed weekly from the well-tailored cuffs of two hard-working ex-movie catastrophe-men named Bill Morrow and Ed Bcloin, who are not named William Cullen Morrow and Edward Everett Beloin.

The material for Mr. Fred Allen is finally written lock, stock, and barrel by Mr. Fred Allen. The standup gags that issue from the muzzle of Mr. Hope as from a 50 mm. machine gun are processed on a conveyor line of typewriters whose owners’ names are not on the peg-in board of the Century Association. Where Mr. Skelton’s jokes are dug up is not known to this listener. But you and I have been around attics and we have our suspicions.

Attics. That is a clew. Humor is ageless, maybe? Sure. Some kinds. For instance, accidents — to other people. And fantastic exaggerations that make dreams come true and nightmares run away. And slips of the tongue. But, Shakespeare’s clowns are not funny today, McGee. Artemus Ward is hard to take today, for today most people spell less badly. There was no recent radio rush for Dere Mable, because the public had moved on to Private Hargrove. Radio moves on, forward, sidewise, or backward with each new day. Radio popularity (which means only what most of the public likes best) is no greater than the personality projected by the voice through the air into the ear. No radio personality is greater than his material. No radio material is more acceptable than the currency of its idiom.

Now go away into a corner with that, little cat’s cradle of advice-to-young authors and see if you can untangle it. If you can, and if you can write, you can please even more people than Mr. Clemens did, and you will become rich, and the government will take it away from you.

Parenthesis: Please, Mr. Ringgold Lardner, will you help us out with the artists, too? Will you please come back and talk to Mr. Victor Borge, and Mr. Allen, and Miss Brice, and to all the unbilled boys and girls in places like Niles, Michigan, who appear on local stations that “nobody” (not even Mr. Hooper or Mr. Crossley or Mr. Gallup) hears, and who are putting out good humor for cakes and fan mail — and just tell them they’re doing all right? Mr. Woollcott, and Mr. White (E. B.), and Mr. Benchley, and Mr. Tarkington, and Mr. Durante, will you not also please help furnish and guide them? They are your people. Mr. George Bingham, of the Hogwallow Kentuckian, won’t you please help Mr. Robert Burns—who could so readily be as great a hillbilly as his namesake instead of a pale Will Rogers? And Mr. Rogers, will you please hire a Hall of Entertainment and lecture to five hundred small-town newspaper editors and radio station managers and tell them in your own words about the humor that makes us all laugh even in the dentist’s chair? Thank you all, gentlemen. End parenthesis.

In conclusion, let us report that we have just been going up and down the roster of the bestselling books, and we cannot find that books of humor, or humorous books, or whatever you call them, are any great shakes in the cash poll of the tastes of the American people. Last week My Life in a Putty Knife Factory and Private Hargrove were still in the running but they were not selling to a degree that would indicate massive reading. Thousands, yes. Millions, no. And yet a good average comedy headliner on the air plays to ten, fifteen, twenty million American people a week. They cannot see his baggy breeches, nor his red nose, and when he falls downstairs a technician crushes a berry box in ins hands, and that is all. No pictures. No description. No adverbs. Above all, no extra words — or the Hall of Entertainment will be promptly cleared because the American people tune him out.

Something pretty shocking seems to have happened in our time. Can it be that the best humorous writing, which is to say the most popular current echo of true American humor, is being written for the radio?