510 Making It New: 1900–1945ever ventured that far. Clarence Shepard Day (1874–1935), for instance, produced a
series of popular books, God and My Father (1932), Life With Father (1935), and Life
With Mother (1937), that depicted a quaint, indignantly conservative character
whose habits of thought had passed out of fashion. Public life was certainly infested
with “chuckle-headed talk and rascality in business and politics”: that was admitted.
But the clear implication was that to expect otherwise, or to want to alter the way
things were, was to become like “father”: an absurdly quixotic figure, a charming but
anachronistic eccentric, whose tirades could only be a source of amusement rather
than instruction. Similarly, and in their different ways, Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
and Ogden Nash (1902–1971) appeared to follow the dictum that small is beautiful –
or, at least, beautifully, and modestly, humorous. The character Benchley portrays in
such books as From Bad to Worse (1934), My Ten Years in a Quandary (1936), and
Inside Benchley (1942) is always thwarted from doing the little, simplest things, like
leaving a party, smoking a cigarette, or wearing a white suit. The resulting comic
cameos neatly capture the frustrations of modern urban existence but also make
them seem tolerable, even attractive: a source of amusement, ingratiating
entertainment, rather than anxiety. Ogden Nash, in turn, knocks language out of
shape and into a wisecrack. His comic verse is pointed by rhythms that become
funnier the more strained and tortuous they are. His swiftly epigrammatic verse
seems somehow designed to obey the injunction that another humorist, S. J. Perelman
(1904–1979), used as the title for one of his books, Keep it Crisp (1946).
Perelman himself tended to obey his own injunction. As a contributor to
The New Yorker for over forty years, he wrote many short satirical pieces, collected in
volumes with titles like Parlor, Bedlam and Bath (1930), Crazy Like a Fox (1944),
The Ill-Tempered Clavichord (1953), and Chicken Inspector No. 23 (1966). They often
took the form of fantastic dramas which, with a surreal style and a feeling for the
slapstick possibilities of language, lampooned advertising, the movies, the mass
media, and popular fiction. And one of their virtues was, nearly always, their brevity.
Ring Lardner (1885–1933) also excelled in the kind of short sketch or story that was
more than half in love with the thing it satirized. With Lardner, however, there was
something more: a remarkable ear for American speech and an extraordinary
capacity for catching on paper what Marianne Moore called the accuracy of the
vernacular. Lardner was an established sports journalist before he began writing a
series of letters in the disguise of “Jack Keefe,” a newcomer to a professional baseball
team. Published first in the Chicago Tribune, they brought him fame as an explorer
of semi-literate idiom and an exposer of demotic vanity, incompetence, and self-
deception. They were published in 1914 as You Know Me, Al: A Busher’s Letters.
Other subsequent volumes included Bib Ballads (1915), a collection of verse, The Big
To w n (1921), a humorous novel, and the collections How to Write Short Stories
(1924) and The Love Nest (1926). Americans of all walks of life appear in his writing,
their personalities defined by their utterances. And, although that writing appears to
obey the conventional limits of contemporary American humor, it is in fact unusually
mordant, even cynical. The songwriters, barbers, stenographers, and others to whom
Lardner gives voice are reduced to their essential banality or dullness, cruelty,GGray_c04.indd 510ray_c 04 .indd 510 8 8/1/2011 7:54:06 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 06 AM