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THE COLLEGIATE JOURNALIST - - Fall 2006, Volume 36, Issue 1
There's nothing else in a college newspaper quite as explosive as humor. And what it may take to fuse the bomb is anybody’s guess. The barbs may wound an innocent bystander. Or satire that would ordinarily have gone unnoticed assumes importance if the person who is its object happens just then to have experienced some misfortune. For many persons, all humor becomes suspect. The attitude of suspicion is ancient and widespread. It probably antedated Aristophanes. It caused Jonathan Swift to blame his own "sin of wit" for his lack of preferment in the church. It is shown by a mother's sending her children from the table because they keep laughing; by a teacher's inquiring sharply, “What’s so funny?” as she reaches for a note that has been causing snickers in her class; by a young man's angry exclamation, “I’ll wipe that grin off your face!” as he rolls up his sleeves and prepares for a fight. And at one time or another it has deflated most people's ego when their best jokes are greeted with silence or with the prim comment, "That really isn't funny." Should humor, then, be banished? Already it has been, to some extent. H. L. Mencken commented on his reading of college papers: "The contributions of freshmen are especially interesting. It takes a year or two to iron .out a student of genuinely lively mind ... but while he lasts he sometimes contributes something rich and racy to the national humor.”1 One hundred college humor magazines are now defunct, Robert Russell comments in Esquire; of the forty still in existence, with a total circulation of 250,000 a month, fewer than a dozen could be called humorous,” he says. “Gone are the He-She jokes. Gone are the febrile stabs at imitating Stephen Leacock. Gone are the feckless parodies or the wicked classic, ‘How to Drive a Car.’”2 An informal survey of newspapers from about two hundred campuses suggests that they lack the local humor which characterized the college press of an earlier day. Joke columns are largely passé; and surely it is good riddance that local names are no longer substituted in the old tales. But much of the original humor is gone, too. And in many papers the syndicated cartoon has replaced local art. College publications are not alone in this diminishment of humor. Melvin Maddocks in a Time essay asks, “Where are the wits of yesterday?” and answers himself, “Dead. Silent or badly sobered.” He comments, “At the moment, the silent absence of laughter is deafening, though the will to laugh is agonizingly there … Not to smile is the new integrity.” 3 Assuming that Collegiate Journalist readers are fairly well acquainted with the distinctions, we shall not waste time with definitions of wit, humor, comedy, satire, and irony, but rather accept Harry Golden's test for an incipient humorist, “to see whether he makes people laugh.” 4 If making people laugh is a legitimate function of the college press, would it be helpful to offer a few suggestions on what's funny and how it got that way? First let us dismiss a few things as unfunny: physical deformity, mental deficiency, and whatever injures the innocent. Stale jokes are considered unfunny; but for the best of them an oblique reference is enough to provoke laughter, as for family anecdotes and for such tales as Hardcastle’s about the old grouse, in She Stoops to Conquer. What then is funny? Charlie Chaplin is said to have said that the funniest thing in the world is for a man to fall down; and he raised many a laugh and made a fortune in proving the statement. Joseph Wood Krutch cites G. K. Chesterton on this point: “When a horse falls on the street, we do not,” he said, “laugh. But when a man takes a tumble we do - at the sight of the son of God slipping on a banana peel.” 6 To fall down - - but not to stay down. Who has not witnessed some such funny incident? The hostess for a table of bridge falls as she brings in a plate of fudge; her guests laugh unrestrainedly, since she didn't drop the candy. A student who works at the college poultry plant sometimes brings eggs to some faculty members. One icy morning he slipped and fell, and slid along several yards on the back of his neck; but he held up the sack of eggs so that not one was cracked. Was it a funny sight? The teacher who was watching did not laugh - - not till later, when she knew there were no broken bones. For a pompous person to fall down may be funny even if he breaks a leg, the laughter being justified on moral grounds, that “Pride goeth before a fall.” The incongruous is funny. According to the folk tales of many lands, it is the stupid youngest brother who always excels. Is this comedy? Or did the stupid youngest brothers write the stories? The contrast between the little short man and the tall thin one explains in part at least the long-time popularity of the comic strip of Mutt and Jeff. The greatest masterpiece of this technique (and some think it is the greatest of all novels) is Don Quixote; in contrast with the Don's impractical schemes and his high-flown language is the down-to-earth plain-speaking of his squire, Sancho Panza. THE UNEXPECTED is funny - - maybe. There are many bright little stories on any campus, waiting to be picked up and published. One paper carried this little joke on its own circulation manager: “Was your last week’s paper late? Guess who forgot the postal rates went up!” Another told about the dormitory assistants who checked every room during a rain to be sure the windows were closed - - only to return and find their own room soaking wet. One of the tales in Life on the Mississippi is an example par excellence of the surprise ending. “There used to be an excellent pilot on the river, who was a somnambulist,” Mark Twain begins. So the reader is warned, to an extent. The story goes on to tell that, when the boat was approaching Helena, Arkansas, “the water was low, and the crossing above the town in a very blind and tangled condition.” The pilot at the wheel was considering whether to call X to assist him. Just then “the door opened and X walked in and suggested, ‘Let me take her, George.’” He took the wheel and then stood at ease, “coaxing her a little to this side and then to that, as gently and as sweetly as if the time had been noonday.” George himself felt so at ease that he asked X to “hold her five minutes longer, partner, and let me run down and get a cup of coffee.” But as George was “biting into a pie ... and comforting himself with coffee,” the night watchman asked who was at the wheel. On being told that X was, he exclaimed, “Dart for the pilothouse, quicker than lightning!” The somnambulist had left, and George was barely able to swing the boat away from a towhead. Good enough - - a well-turned story, properly prepared for. But George’s comment provides the twist to surprise and delight: “And if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin piloting when he is sound asleep, what couldn’t he do if he was dead!”7 Irony may be tragic, pathetic, or comic. Charlie Brown, the non-hero of the comic strip Peanuts, is both pathetic and comic, and it is only the author-artist's genius in maintaining a balance that keeps his fans from bogging down in the pathos. Thornton Wilder’s Heaven’s My Destination somehow remains comic despite the unfortunate outcome of the young zealot’s preachments. It is the irony in Lolita that identifies Humbert with his fellow-human beings and makes him an object of sympathy as he refers to “my present boundless misery,” to “her sobs in the night - - every night, every night - - the moment, I feigned sleep,” to the windshield wipers “unable to cope with my tears,” and so on.8 Word play is a constant source of humor: puns, spoonerisms, malapropisms, Tom Swifties, and all the other tricks of language. If the school color is green and Brown writes a sports column, “Brown on the Green” makes a good heading - - nothing to make anybody laugh aloud, but a source of pleasure to those recognizing the pun. Spoonerisms as used in college headlines include “To Fraze a Coin” and “If True Yanspose, See Wympathize.” The Tom Swiftie is exemplified in such as “‘This knife cuts well,’ she said sharply” and “’What I need is a good drink,’ he commented dryly.” Not side-splitting wit, but maybe something to lighten to tone of the paper. JAMES THURBER perfected the hard-luck story with a humorous twist, as exemplified in My Life and Hard Times. Frank Sullivan in a series of "Perverse News Items" published in the New Yorker gave a light satiric turn to such sentimental little stories as that of a policeman's rescuing a cat from the roof; Sullivan's police refused to waste time in any such manner--and the cat came down when it got hungry. Both exaggeration and understatement may be humorous; the former is typical of American humor, as in the Paul Bunyan stories and their ilk. Climax and anticlimax both have possibilities; the latter is likely to be sharper. Nowhere is it better exemplified than in Alexander Pope's “The Rape of the Lock.” For an example, take these lines:
The hoax was formerly a favorite medium for humor; but it is highly fraught with possibilities for libel and other disastrous outcomes and is now generally frowned upon. Parody is an ever ready-to-hand form of humor especially adapted to college publications. For it to be effective, the thing parodied must be reasonably familiar to the reader; and students are much more likely to be familiar with a wide selection of literature than is the average man-on-the-street. Without necessarily having a firsthand acquaintance, they at least have heard of Plato, Chaucer, Browning, Hemingway, arid some dozens of other writers included in the survey literature courses, and with many of their works. So the parodies are understandable. SATIRE, TOO, requires some sophistication from readers as well as writers. College students know a great deal about what's going on in the world, about developments in science, government, and human relations, and hence are receptive to satire of current issues. Of all works in the English language, probably the ones most cited by editorial writers and cartoonists are Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Why? Perhaps because the satire is so good-humored, perhaps because it is so universal, perhaps because there are so many parallels in the present day. Who has not felt that for him, as for Alice and the Queen, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place?” Who does not see and hear example on example of statements based on the Humpty Dumpty theory, “When I use a word .. .it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less?” Who has not felt that other people's battles were as stupid as Tweedledum and Tweedledee's over the spoiling of a nice new rattle?10 Gulliver's Travels is a second favorite for quotation by newspaper and magazine writers, especially the voyage to Lilliput. Swift has designed the antics of these small folk to expose the foolishness of certain English customs, which likewise have their parallels in present-day American life. The cry for a revival of humor is widespread. “It is time we reasserted the American prerogative to laugh at ourselves,” says R. P. Falk.11 “The world needs humor as never before,” says Richard Armour.12 “I am strongly in favor of laughter, and anything or anyone promoting it,” says Malcolm Muggeridge.13 “ ... the soul must be purged by laughter.” “The only virile attitude to take in the face of the human condition is to laugh at it,” says Jean Anouilh in La Petite Moliere.14 “The world is all the poorer for the lack of fools,” says Ladislas M. Orsy, S. J., who points out that "the fool of the Middle Ages had a double role, to entertain and “to tell the truth in a cheerful way.”15 The topsy-turvy world, full of double-talk, of wars and other quarrels based on trivia, of political and economic walruses weeping over the oysters they are devouring, of hoop-jumping for political preferment, and of ribbon-pinning rewards -- this looking-glass world needs a new Alice and a new Gulliver. Where will they come from? Lewis Carroll might never have perfected his talent had it not been for the humorous verse with which he entertained his brothers and sisters during his youth. Swift wrote volumes of prose and verse which delight the specialist in eighteenth century literature but which are little known to the non-specialist, except for Gulliver. COLLEGE HUMOR magazines and newspapers have nourished the talents of many outstanding wits, both writers and cartoonists, of early and mid-twentieth century America, among them Bennett Cerf (Columbia Jester), Robert Benchley and Gluyas Williams (Harvard Lampoon), James Thurber (Ohio State Sun Dial), Art Buchwald (University of Southern California Wampus), and Peter Arno (Vale Record).16 “The humorous writers has to be a man of his own time,” says Harry Golden.17 A representative of these times, writing in Esquire, suggests, “You ought to make an attempt to understand this youth humor ....if for no other reason than that it's causing controversy.” 18 Perhaps staff members, teachers of writing courses, college administrators, and friends of education all need to re-evaluate the role of wit and humor; to re-establish it as a part of the student press; to encourage it by literary prizes; perhaps even to rank it with athletic prowess and award four-year scholarships to the wittiest of the high school graduates. Footnotes |
25 Years Ago this Fall...