478. Let's Have a Laugh: American Humor

BROWDERBOOKS

Four down and four to go.  That's the score for publishing my books, fiction and nonfiction.  Or maybe 3 1/2 to go, since Forbidden Brownstones has a publisher, is in progress, and will certainly be published. 

 

Which leaves three, all of them completed and in need of a publisher.

• Lady of the Chameleons, about a fictional French actress (modeled in part on Sarah Bernhardt) who comes to these shores for a nationwide tour (she would like to meet General Custer, or failing that, Mr. Sitting Bull).
• Dinner of Dreams, about a glib-tongued operator who offers nineteenth-century Americans whatever they want, or think they want: salvation, gold mining stocks, town lots in Western towns that don't quite exist, stock in a railroad that has yet to lay track, health and well-being.
• Metropolis, a huge, sprawling novel ranging in time from 1830 to 1880.  Kaleidoscopic, it follows a large cast of characters -- the Wall Street speculator Daniel Drew and the abortionist Madame Restell prominent among them -- through four sections, each a book in itself: Go Ahead, War, Flash, and Bust.

I'll be lucky if even one of these gets published in my lifetime.  The last one, being four books in one, is especially problematic, unless I self-publish it.  But it provides the epic setting for all the other novels, and in some cases the origins or final outcome of a number of recurring characters.  Only when set against it do the other novels acquire their full significance. 

So much for me and my books.  It's time for some humor.

       LET'S  HAVE  A  LAUGH:  AMERICAN  HUMOR

What's supposed be funny often isn't.  Back in my childhood, how often I and my family listened to comedians on the radio.  At appropriate intervals, blasts of recorded laughter ("audience enhancement") would assail our ears, while we sat there deadpan, unamused.  Did we lack a sense of humor?  Not at all.  A lot of the funny stuff on radio just wasn't funny.  Then, occasionally, it was, and we laughed.

Humor is perishable.  What one generation finds funny, another generation may not.  And it can be regional, inciting laughter in one region and falling flat in another.  Please keep this in mind, as I offer examples of American humor from the past.

When I used to vacation with relatives in rural Brown County, Indiana,  I heard that Eleanor Roosevelt, the President's wife, had once visited  the area and was shocked to see what passed for an outhouse in rural areas without running water: a board with a hole cut in it.  She started a movement to have such crude contrivances replaced by real toilets, even though there would be no running water.  The local name for this improvement: the Eleanor.  Local humor or a gesture of gratitude?  You decide.

Here now are some examples of American humor from an even earlier time.

• A sign at the Laughing Gas filling station in the 1920s in Salome, Arizona (pop. 100): SMILE  --  YOU DON'T HAVE TO STAY HERE, BUT WE DO.
• An improvised charcoal sign in Congress Hollow, Ohio, where, sometime before 1842, Henry Clay and a group of Congressmen were spilled from their stage:  HERE  CONGRESS  FELL  ON ITS  ASS.

Nineteenth-century tavern guest registers -- huge calfbound books with spaces for each traveler's name, residence, destination, and remarks -- attracted colorful comments in the "remarks" column.  A prime example is from an Indianapolis inn on the National Road, a major gateway to the West before the coming of railroads.  Many visitors just identified themselves as "Stranger," and a fancy Easterner put" "C.H., from any place but this."  Another patron identified himself as "a genuine dealer in counterfeit money," and another remarked, "Still causing women to weep."  And when one traveler put "Stranger and wife," another added, "or some other old whore."

Place names in the West were often a mix of grim humor and grim reality.  California boasted such locales as

• Hell's Delight
• Jackass Gulch
• Last Chance
• Puke Ravine
• Skunk Gulch
• Loafer's Retreat
• Quack Hill
• Chicken-Thief Flat
• Murderer's Bar
• Skinflint
• Chucklehead Diggings
• Poverty Hill
• Lousy Ravine

Rest assured, there was a story behind each name.

Calvin Coolidge was our president from 1923 to 1929.  As Harding's Vice President he served out Harding's term when Harding died, then was elected for a full four-year term himself.  Quiet and somber, he was the proverbial reticent New Englander.  A woman once came up to him and said, "Oh Mr. Coolidge, you're such a reticent man.  I just bet a friend five dollars I can make you say more than two words."  Coolidge's reply: "You lose."

And of course there was Mae West, as American as they come.  

A friend: "Goodness, Mae, where did you get all those diamonds?"                  Mae: "Goodness had nothin' to do with it."  

But without hearing her intonation, you get only half the humor.

And Eartha Kitt singing, 

    "I'm just an old-fashioned girl,

    I want an old-fashioned house

    With an old-fashioned sink

    And an old-fashioned millionaire."

And in film, the Marx Brothers.  "Who are you going to believe?" asks Chico.  "Me or your own eyes?"

And there is ethnic humor:  "Help!  Help!" cries the Jewish lady in Miami Beach.  "My son the doctor is drowning!"

Which is just a sample of modern American humor, more sophisticated than the humor of nineteenth-century rural America.  

So there it is: American humor at a glance.  Only a glance.  I haven't even mentioned Mark Twain.

Coming soon: A Queens neighborhood where 167 languages are spoken.  Can you guess its name?

©  2020.  Clifford Browder