Satire and Humor

SATIRE AND HUMOR

Era of Satire

Cynicism and ebullience coexisted during the 1920s and found joint expression as satire in words and in images. It was an era when ridicule was the weapon of choice. Politicians, financiers, intellectuals, puritans, reformers, feminists, and revolutionaries were popular targets. The main target was pomposity.

Irreverence and Wit

The defining characteristic of American humor is irreverence—the refusal to be impressed by or respectful of institutionalized power or conventional morality. Wit was prized during the 1920s, and reputations were built on the application of it. The reputations of literary humorists rarely outlive them because humor becomes identified with its time: a comic style often achieves its humor by originality of perception and expression; repeated and copied, it becomes corny. Satire and parody, however brilliant, depend on reader recognition of material that usually has a short literary life. Of the many 1920s humorists, the one who has achieved the greatest permanent stature and readership is Ring W. Lardner. His acutely observed misanthrope's sketches of personalities and human relationships, in particular, have retained an audience; and some of his topical material—baseball, for example—has acquired historical value.

Parody and Verse

The material ranged from literary humor to nonsense. Parody and satire were very popular. Donald Ogden Stewart, whose Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad (1924) and The Crazy Fool (1925) were labeled "crazy humor," combined parody with nonsense. The most popular parodist of the decade was Robert Benchley, who moved from writing to performing his work. His "Treasurer's Report," a scatterbrained monologue, was widely reprinted and performed. The 1920s were also the last period when humorous verse was a form of mass entertainment. Samuel Hoffenstein (Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing, 1928) and Don Marquis (Archy and Mehitabel, 1927) were widely read. Franklin P. Adams's New York World column, "The Conning Tower," featured his own poems and welcomed the verse contributions of readers. His most widely known poem was based on the Chicago Cubs double-play combination and began—

These are the saddest of possible words:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."

Algonquin Group

A group of the wits who wrote for New York publications formed the Vicious Circle, so named because they frequently lunched at a round table in the Algonquin Hotel. Since some of them had newspaper columns, they printed each other's witticisms and advanced their collective celebrity. This incestuous cadre, featuring Benchley, Adams, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, and George S. Kaufman, raised the wisecrack into a literary genre. Parker achieved a permanent reputation on the basis of her wisecracking, self-triumphing contempt; reviewing Winnie-the-Pooh as New Yorker columnist "Constant Reader" she wrote "Tonstant weader fwew up."

Magazine Satire

The New Yorker, launched in 1925, initially had a strong component of parody or burlesque in its articles and drawings. The ridicule, as in the cartoons of Peter Arno, was intended as entertainment—not as social protest. But the radical journals cultivated angry satire intended to move readers to action, as did the drawings of Art Young for The Masses.

College Humor

College humor magazines had substantial readerships and served as incubators for verbal and cartoon humorists. The best known in the East were The Yale Record, The Princeton Tiger, The Columbia Jester, The Dartmouth Jack-O'-Lantern, and The Harvard Lampoon. Apprentice wits hoped to move from these publications to the commercial humor magazines such as Judge, Life (before the title was acquired for a photo-news magazine), and The New Yorker.

Thurber

James Thurber (ex Ohio State Sundial ) and S. J. Perelman (ex Brown Jug) did their best work after the 1920s but published first books in the 1920s. Both became identified with The New Yorker. Thurber and E. B. White collaborated on Is Sex Necessary? Or Why You Feel the Way You Do, a travesty of psychology books. There were abundant targets for humor and receptive readers in the 1920s.

Humor as Literature

Several humorists ascended from journalism and commercial writing to the ranks of literature. Sportswriter Damon Runyon's low-life stories attained an enduring reputation. Screenwriter Anita Loos wrote a minor classic, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" Both writers used the American language in innovative ways—as did Lardner—and one of the characteristics of 1920s humor was its linguistic resourcefulness.

Lewis

During the 1920s Sinclair Lewis's well-received novels—Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry —utilized exaggeration and caricature to ridicule the materialism and cultural poverty of American life. Foreign readers regarded Lewis's satires as documentary realism, and in 1930 he became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for literature.

Sources:

Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America's Humor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);

Margaret Case Harriman, The Vicious Circle: The Story of the Algonquin Round Table (New York: Rinehart, 1951).