Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 8, 1994 TAG: 9401120008
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: C12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
\ Russell Baker, the New York Times columnist and host of public television's ``Masterpiece Theater,'' has done us a great favor. He has rounded up nearly 150 pieces of funny writing and issued them in his ``Book of American Humor.''
The stuff is not only funny. It is beautifully written, so the collection serves as an exercise in appreciation as much as laughter.
Baker's picks include works by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and Artemis Ward, S.J. Perelman and E.B. White, Garrison Keillor and Nora Ephron, and many, many more.
Not every entry will please every reader, but in all, the quality is unusually high.
In his elegant introduction, Baker contends that for many of us, the New Yorker magazine under Harold Ross defined humor for at least the first third of this century. Those were the glory days of Perelman, White, Benchley, Thurber and others whose works live on in still-funny anthologies. Many of their classic efforts are contained in this volume, too.
In more recent times, ``in-your-face'' humor of the sort associated with ``Doonesbury,'' ``Saturday Night Live'' and authors including P.J. O'Rourke and Dave Barry has come into fashion. Baker theorizes that this is just a latter-day version of what Mark Twain produced. It's viewed as uncouth by some and is wildly popular with others. At its best, it can make even a Puritan laugh.
Baker notes that some humor does not age well. Fully half of what he examined in Katharine and E.B. White's ``A Subtreasury of American Humor,'' the classic of its time, comes across as unfunny today, he says. For that reason, he includes no sketches by Will Rogers, W.C. Fields or others whose impact depended greatly on their personal delivery. Fred Allen is in here, though, and so is Mae West and the late Bill Vaughn.
For my money, three of the first four pieces - Nunnally Johnson's ``Clothes Make the Man,'' Keillor's ``Jack Schmidt, Arts Administrator'' and O. Henry's ``Confessions of a Humorist'' - by themselves justify the price of this book. The other piece, by Damon Runyan, doesn't quite cut it. Humor indeed is subjective, and perishable.
But when you throw in Roy Blount Jr., Molly Ivins, Calvin Trillin and others, you really have a bargain. Fine and funny writing abounds.
Take, for example, Johnson's piece, ``Clothes Make the Man.'' It tells of a hotel manager who is bent upon improving the character of the establishment he has just taken over.
``Years before, when it was first built, the Aragon had had a measure of class, but for a decade or more it had been one of Broadway's most contented flea bags - a bright and gilded rabbit warren inhabited by obsolete vaudeville performers, ancient song writers, one-client theatrical agents, nonproducing stage producers and small-bore hustlers of every age and police description. At seven o'clock of any evening, a good loud cry of `Thief!' would have emptied the lobby like a scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Not that they were all guilty, of course - just nervous.''
Johnson describes the manager's underhanded efforts at changing the joint by driving away its longtime customers in hopes of creating ``a good standard New York convention hotel, with a fair percentage of guests wearing fezzes and smoking twenty-five cent cigars.''
He is thwarted by one veteran resident whose only crime lay in the loudness of his wardrobe. The story is masterfully written and wonderfully done, and it is only one among many in the collection.
by CNB