Humorists: From Hogarth to Noël
Coward
By Paul
Johnson
(Harper, 228 pages,
$25.99)
In this eclectic collection of highly readable essays held
loosely together by a couple of common thematic threads, Paul
Johnson, one of the foremost historians and men of letters of our
age, establishes himself as an accomplished humorist in his own
right.
Early on, discussing the essence of humor, he shows us some
wonderful examples of what it is not, and in so doing makes us (at
least some of us) laugh. “Many people, for a variety of reasons,”
he writes, “hate to hear others laugh.… Karl Marx thought to pun
was a sure sign of ‘the intellectual lumpen proletariat,’
and rebuked Engels for so lowering himself (in German, of
course).”
In fact, in Germany, he tells us, laughing was “regarded as a
form of weakness.”
“Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke… was said to have laughed
only twice: once when told that a certain French fortress was
impregnable, and once when his mother-in-law died.” Martin
Heidegger, probably one of the last names along with Immanuel Kant
to pop up when discussing humor, “is recorded to have laughed only
once, at a picnic with Ernst Junger in the Harz Mountains. Junger
leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his
lederhosen split with a tremendous crack.”
Apocryphal? Perhaps. But funny. And certainly Sid Caesar
material. All humorists treasure Germany as starting point and
lodestone. But beyond that, it’s Johnson’s intention to explore in
this book, the fourth in a series (preceded by Intellectuals,
Creators, and Heroes) the nature of humor in general and how
it has been expressed over time.
“If comics fall into broad categories, each, if any good, is
sui generis,” Johnson writes. “The gallery I have
assembled in this book is a strange collection of geniuses, worldly
failures, drunks, misfits, cripples, and gifted idiots. They had in
common only the desire, and the ability, to make large numbers of
people laugh.”
In this series of books collecting together intellectuals,
creators and heroes, I reckon the comics are most valuable. The
world is a vale of tears, always has been and surely always will
be. Those who can dry our tears, and force reluctant smiles to
trembling lips, are more precious to us, if the truth be told, than
all the statesmen and generals and brainy people, even the great
artists. For they ease the agony of life a little, and make us even
imagine the possibility of being happy.
Some of us may have never quite thought of William Hogarth that
way, but Johnson does. Hogarth, he tells us, is “the only great
master to make you laugh.” And to illustrate, he gives us the
testimony of Charles Lamb, who “had a whole room devoted to
Hogarth, the place covered in prints, from floor to ceiling, which
he furnished with a ragged old carpet and a rackety easy chair; and
there he would sit, and drink gin, and smoke his pipe, and
laugh.”
Johnson describes the details in those prints that made Lamb
laugh. One of them, An Election Entertainment, shows us
“Hogarthian comedy at its most direct, brutal, and bizarre.… Most
of the characters are drunk.… Drink is available, literally, in
great tubs. Some of the faces are bestial in their vile
distortions, and the noise, stench, belching, and cries of derision
are almost palpable.… Here indeed, is the putative democracy in
which the British, alone in the world, rejoiced, and Hogarth shows
it in all its naked turpitude.”
In many cases, writes Johnson, his works “are not exactly
funny.” Gin Lane, especially, comes to mind. But “the core
of Hogarth’s work is his moral paintings, in which he sought to
tell the truth about English society in the hope of reforming
it.”
THE FIGURES JOHNSON assembles, as he points out, have little in
common. But what most of them do seem to share is a sardonic view
of life and a quick wit. In America, especially, this finds
expression in the one-liner.
In his chapter on Benjamin Franklin, Johnson writes: “It can
fairly be said that the one-liner, the quintessential form of
American humor, was born in Poor Richard’s Almanac.” (“God
heals, and the doctor takes the fees.” “Marry your son when you
will, but your daughter when you can.” “One good husband is worth
two good wives, for the scarcer things are, the more they are
valued.”)
For Johnson, the one-liner runs in a straight line down from
Franklin through Mark Twain to Dorothy Parker, the sole American
woman represented here, celebrated for the wit that “sprang from
her sardonic nature, and her delight in words.”
He provides a sampler. This from her address to the American
Horticultural Society: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t
make her think.” To Harold Ross: “Wit has truth in it. Wisecracking
is simply mental calisthenics.” On the theater world: “Scratch an
actor and find an actress.” On a work by Horace Walpole: “This is
not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with
great force.”
“Wit should be cut to the bone, she said. So she called
Alexander Woollcott’s Manhattan apartment ‘Wit’s end,’” Johnson
writes. “And for her tombstone she wrote her own epitaph: ‘This is
on me.’”
Charlie Chaplin, who, as Johnson points out, never adapted to
the talkies and seems today little more than a jumped-up mime,
poses special problems. Chaplin, writes Johnson, “is, perhaps, the
most difficult of all the great comedians to sum up,” a man who
“inspired deep and irrational dislike, not only from public bodies,
like the American government, but from those close to him.”
A misogynist who fancied himself a ladies man, he loved to bore
others with stories of his seductions. And according to Johnson, he
skated very close to the edge with children.
Politically, Chaplin was less than astute. “His unwillingness
ever to criticize Communism was his greatest moral failure,”
Johnson writes. And although Johnson never says it, he was never
very funny.
Nancy Mitford, who Johnson knew and who associated with a lot of
people he found superficial and silly, seems to have been included
primarily because she’d made her mark with an article in
Encounter that, among other things, gave us the terms “U”
and “non-U.”
The article, “The English Aristocracy,” dealt with language as
an indicator of class status, a subject he tells us also explains
much of Noël Coward’s success. The subject of humor here seems to
get sidetracked by a peculiarly British sociological shuffle. But
the detour does provide Johnson with an opportunity to segue into a
discussion of political correctness.
JOHNSON DIVIDES HUMOR into several rough categories with the
creation of chaos the most important, and Groucho Marx (who, like
many of the figures in this book, Johnson knew personally), the
supreme chaos creator. Other chaos creators are W.C. Fields, Laurel
and Hardy, James Thurber.
In another category are “those who look for, and find, and
analyze, the sheer egregious weirdness of the individual human
being, and who present them vividly and accurately.” Among them, he
gives us Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, G. K Chesterton,
Damon Runyon.
Finally, there’s an endangered category of humor, growing out of
“the interplay between different classes, races, nationalities, and
ages.… Today, of course, being an age of Political Correctness, the
increasingly authoritarian form of militant liberalism, many types
of this kind of humor are censored, indeed some are unlawful and
punished by prison sentence.”
Political Correctness in England is primarily a system of verbal
and written censorship, banning all words and expressions likely to
“cause offense.” … In an attempt to put down “racism,” the concept
of “hate terms” was introduced into English law for the very first
time. This makes many words and expressions unlawful, and
punishable by fines and imprisonment.
The implications? “Differences in sex, age, color, race,
religion, physical ability, and strength lie at the source of
probably the majority of jokes since the beginning of human
self-consciousness. And all jokes are liable to provoke discomfort
if not positive misery among those laughed at.… The future for
humorists thus looks bleak, at the time I write this.”
Are the prospects really bleak? Perhaps. But let’s not slide
into the slough of despond. Instead, let’s give the last word to
Charlie Chaplin, who could conceivably have won a place in this
collection for these lines, delivered personally to Johnson: “The
best jokes are the simplest. The finest stage direction ever is
Shakespeare’s, from The Winter’s Tale: ‘Exit, pursued by a
bear.’ ”
