Making It New: 1900–1945 511violence, or stupidity. The sardonic surfaces of his fiction only partially conceal a
deeply pessimistic viewpoint, as Lardner allows his “average” characters to condemn
themselves out of their own, forever open mouths.
Apart from Lardner, the two most notable humorous writers in the first half of the
twentieth century were James Thurber (1894–1961) and Dorothy Parker (1893–1967).
Thurber was a regular contributor to The New Yorker for many years, as both a
cartoonist and a writer. His sketches and stories were collected in such volumes as
The Owl in the Attic, and Other Perplexities (1931), The Seal in My Bedroom, and
Other Predicaments (1932), and My World – and Welcome to It! (1942). With
E. B. White (1899–1985), he wrote Is Sex Necessary? (1929), satirizing pseudoscientific
sex manuals. With Elliott Nugent (1896–1980), he produced a successful dramatic
comedy, The Male Animal (1940). Of his own prose and drawings, Thurber said, “the
little wheels of their invention are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy.”
This was in keeping with his view that, as he put it, “humor is the best that lies closest
to the familiar, to that part of the familiar which is humiliating, distressing, even
tragic.” The strange and whimsical characters Thurber describes, some of them
animals and many of them people, respond to upsets, incredible accidents, with a
sad persistence. They all seem repressed and misshapen, subject to malignant
circumstances that somehow they survive, even combat. “Humor is a kind of
emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect,” Thurber observed. The
chaotic times Thurber’s own humor, in particular, forces attention on stretch “from
the year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to the year coffee was rationed” – that is, the
period between the two world wars. And the victims of chaos who receive his special
attention are all his sad middle-aged men, caught by the dreariness of their lives,
custom, and predatory women – and quietly dreaming of escape into a world of
adventure, where they can perform feats of daring that range from the quaintly
romantic to the comically bizarre.
The humor of Dorothy Parker was considerably more acerbic. Her writing career
began as a dramatic and literary critic in her native New York City; and she soon
acquired an almost legendary reputation for her malicious and sardonic wisecracks.
She once described the actress Katharine Hepburn, for instance, as “running the
whole gamut of emotions from A to B.” Then, in 1926, she published her first book
of poems, Enough Rope. A bestseller, it was followed by two other books of verse and,
in 1936, by her collected poems, Not So Deep As a Well. The poems show that Parker
was just as skeptical about relations between the sexes as Thurber was. Only, whereas
Thurber tended to show feckless husbands at the mercy of tyrannical wives, Parker
was more cynically evenhanded. She simply dismissed the possibility of romantic
fulfillment for either sex. “By the time you swear you’re his, / Shivering and sighing, / ”
she declares in “Unfortunate Coincidence,” “And he vows his passion is / Infinite,
undying – ”, then, she concludes, “Lady, make a note of this: / One of you is lying.”
Parker pursued similar caustic variations on the frustrations of love and the futility
of idealism in her prose work. The short stories and sketches collected in Laments for
the Living (1930), for example, in After Such Pleasures (1933) and Here Lies (1939)
are marked by their wry wit, their economy and polish, but, above all, by their refusalGGray_c04.indd 511ray_c 04 .indd 511 8 8/1/2011 7:54:07 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 07 AM