[In the following essay, van Gelder reviews Exit Laughing, finding it entertaining, but ultimately unsatisfying.]

Irvin S. Cobb learned his trade in a rugged school where facility in writing was the reward for energy and vanity, and where politeness was the price of safety. He has, of course, been writing autobiography for years. A strong instinct for self-preservation early taught him to believe that the humor that picks on what is ridiculous in other white men is a spurious brand. The proper study for the genuine droll, he considers, is that droll himself, and as Mr. Cobb has lived much of his life on the profits of humor, he has inevitably written a great deal about himself. His early experiences in Paducah, Ky., where there were plenty of guns left over from the Civil War and where a man had time to nurse an eccentricity into a definitely bad temper, have been a rich mine of material. His reportorial adventures in New York, and in Europe during the first World War, are almost as familiar as his operation.

That this should be so is proof of his good judgment. This old material, cast in new phrases and garnished with fresh anecdotes, makes the best part of this not-necessarily final autobiography. On the home grounds of his youth Cobb can show Cobb as eager, likable, a bear for work, an easily entertained young man who becomes adept at entertaining. But it is as though he had ballooned in some fashion when, after developing as one of the most skilled and efficient reporters of his time, he moved out into the big money fields of popular magazine writing and lecturing, and from then on never quite had touch with the sources of his own strength. There is a very clear line of demarcation. When he writes of the people he knew when he was young he presents characters who stand and move with the life that he puts into his descriptions of them. Later the people mentioned are all too often "important" heroes or despicable boors and cads. The once clear, friendly look has become, it seems, impossible.

The men and women of the Judge Priest stories came from Paducah, where Cobb was born and where, at 16, he obtained his first newspaper job. There had been Cobbs in Paducah since the early days, and his mother's people, members of the Saunders family, also had arrived not very long after the Revolutionary War. Cobb grew up in a nest of kinfolk, with uncles and aunts to spare. Judge Priest was physically a reincarnation of the late Judge William S. Bishop—"the high bald forehead, the pudgy shape, the little white paintbrush of a chin whisker, the strident high-pitched voice which, issuing from that globular tenement, made a grotesque contrast, as though a South American tapir had swallowed a tomtit alive and was letting the tomtit do the talking for him." Some of Judge Priest's mental attitudes were borrowed from Hal Corbett, a lawyer who spent most of his time running for office, and Mr. Cobb's father. For the bit players in the tales he drew from the Negro community. Connie Lee, who survives as the town's leading chiropodist—and is, by the way, the only survivor—was "Jeff Poindexter," Judge Priest's private retainer.

Irvin Cobb went to work at 16 because his father, hurt in the Civil War, determined, according to his son, to drink himself to death. He had lost his job with a steamboat line and had nothing left but an insurance policy which carried an anti-suicide clause. So very deliberately he set about to collect that insurance for his family. "He had health though, and was strong, and to accomplish this took four hard years." In the first year of his effort Irvin Cobb started writing news.

His apprenticeship was rigorous but it later paid full dividends. With a beginning salary of $1.75 a week, it was his privilege to write just about all that he wanted to write, and he could always be sure that the people he knew would read him if he could keep his copy even moderately lively. He does not mention restrictions as to style—probably there were none. But there were the empty forms that must be filled, there were thousands of words to be put down every day.

At 19 Cobb was managing editor of the paper, but that didn't last long, as "the owners soon found out what was wrong with the paper." However at the age of 20, when his father died, he was earning twelve dollars a week, and his string as a correspondent was lengthening. Covering the best stories that Kentucky could provide and working so fast and hard that it was necessary to discover and make use of every natural gift in order to get through each day, he learned to write by free, popular writing. When, near the beginning of this century, he came to New York, he had tested himself to capacity and thus had a clear idea of what kind of performance he could turn in under stress. Success in New York came fairly rapidly and within a few years he was known as the highest paid reporter in the country, and George Horace Lorimer of The Saturday Evening Post had made a bid for his services—a bid that was promptly accepted. After that magazine correspondence, the lecture platform after-dinner speaking, Hollywood and much later, a few turns as an actor.

But now the emphasis changes and tales of Mr. Cobb's prowess as a big eater replace the earlier stories of work. William Randolph Hearst and Ray Long are not shown objectively as were the Monkey Wrench Corner idlers in Paducah or the bosses on The Evening World. There are "important people" introduced simply as "important people," with a few glib patches of praise pasted on them. And there are some curious now-it-can-be-told yarns that leave, it must be admitted a rather peculiar taste. We were not at war with Germany in 1914 but Mr. Cobb's story of the letter he brought from Germany for delivery to Franz von Papen in Washington is unavoidably unsavory. The same might be said of his barging in on President Wilson soon after we entered the war, intent on winning "me a pair of shoulder straps." Wilson refused his request that special influence be used to get him into the Army as an officer and told him that "the next time you want something at my hands let it be something worth your having and worth my giving." But he put his arm around Cobb's shoulders to take the sting out of the words, with the result that Cobb "came away with an enhanced chest expansion" that, to tell the truth, is still a bit noticeable.