on-writing-well

Humor 217
"Right you are," said the Boss. "But when I plugged for
the lowly Wage-Earner I never had been in the Directors'
Office to see the beautiful Tableau entitled 'Virtue copping
out the Annual Dividend.' I don't know that I can make the
situation clear to you, so I will merely remark that all those
who get on our side of the Fence are enabled to catch a new
Angle on this Salary Question."
Moral: For Educational Purposes, every Employé should
be taken into the Firm.
The universal truth in that hundred-year-old gem is still true
today, as it is in almost all the Fables. "Ade was my first influence
as a humorist," S. J. Perelman told me. "He had a social
sense of history. His pictures of Hoosier life at the turn of the
century are more documentary than any of those studies on how
much people paid for their coal. His humor was rooted in a perception
of people and places. He had a cutting edge and an
acerbic wit that no earlier American humorist had."
From Ade I proceeded to Ring Lardner, author of the classic
line "Shut up, he explained," partly to demonstrate that dramatic
dialogue is another form that can serve the humorist. I'm
a pushover for Lardners nonsense plays, which he presumably
wrote just to amuse himself. But he was also lampooning the
holy conventions of playwriting, in which yards of italic type are
used to establish what's happening onstage. Act I of Lardners /
Gaspiri (The Upholsterers) consists of ten lines of dialogue,
none of it involving the listed characters, and nine lines of irrelevant
italic, concluding with "The curtain is lowered for seven
days to denote the lapse of a week." In his career Lardner would
put humor to powerful use in many literary forms, such as the
baseball novel, You Know Me, Al. His ear was perfectly tuned to
American piety and self-delusion.
Next I resurrected Archy and Mehitahel, by Don Marquis, to
show that this influential humorist also used an unorthodox