on-writing-well

228 ON WRITING WELL
said I would tell them when they could read him again. That day
never came.
I adopted the Chic Young principle—stick to what you
know—and began to read from writers who use humor as a vein
that runs quietly through their work. One piece was E. B.
White s "The Eye of Edna," in which White recalls waiting on
his Maine farm for the arrival of Hurricane Edna while listening
for several days to inane radio reports of its progress. Its a perfect
essay, full of wisdom and gentle wit.
Another writer whose work I excavated was Stephen Leacock,
a Canadian. I recalled him from my boyhood as hilarious
but was afraid that, as often happens in looking up old friends,
he would turn out to be merely "comical." His pieces, however,
had survived the erosion of time, and one that I particularly
remembered—"My Financial Career," in which he tries to open
a bank account with $56—still seems the model piece of humor
on how rattled we all become when dealing with banks, libraries
and other uptight institutions. Rereading Leacock reminded me
that another function of the humorist is to represent himself as
the victim or dunce, helpless in most situations. Its therapy for
readers, enabling them to feel superior to the writer, or at least
to identify with a fellow victim. A humorist who deals with ordinary
life never runs out of material, as Erma Bombeck enjoyably
proved over many decades.
So that was the direction in which our Yale humor class
began to move. Many of the students wrote about their famines.
We ran into problems, mainly of exaggeration, and gradually
solved them, trying to achieve control, cutting the extra sentence
that explains a funny point that is already implicit. A hard
decision was to know how much exaggeration was allowable and
how much was too much. One student wrote a funny piece
about what a terrible cook his grandmother was. When I praised
it he said she was really a very good cook. I said I was sorry to
hear it—somehow the piece now seemed less funny. He asked if