[In the following essay, White praises Exit Laughing as a peculiarly American autobiography.]

This book [Exit Laughing] is only incidentally the "life story" of Irvin S. Cobb. It is an adventure in humorous American humor. Taking it by and large, the humor in Irvin Cobb's autobiography, which bubbles like eternal Pierian springs on every page, is the humor of the selfkidder. He has a lot of stories about others, but if he laughs at a poor devil, it is only to reveal the fact that Cobb is not superior to the poor devil, but is his brother under the skin.

Mark Twain, at least in his earlier days, was a self-kidder. The travel stories of Mark Twain—Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, Innocence Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, and his boys' stories, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, were pure self-kidding, and throughout this entire book, Irvin Cobb walks under a fool's cap, with chalked face and broad pantaloons, the everlasting clown who, despite his ribaldry and laughter, is pictured here scrupulously if unconsciously a gentleman and a scholar and a judge of good whiskey. Indeed a judge of good whiskey, who is, for the purpose of this narrative, slightly squizzed, so that he paints himself in perspective and, as Kipling put it, "Stands beside and sees himself behaving like a blooming fool." Indeed, again to quote Kipling, this book was obviously written by the gentleman and scholar and judge of good whiskey, as the story of one who "sits in clink without his boots, beholdin' how the world was made."

The skeleton of the autobiography puts down the facts of the life of Irvin Cobb; born in the little town of Paducah, Kentucky, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, just after the close of what, at that time, was known in the north as the Rebellion, later was called the Civil War, and now, in polite society, is referred to as the War between the States. The War between the States was a national episode now rapidly glimmering across twilight's purple rim of our history. It is becoming a national myth. But the setting of that period of reconstruction during which Irvin Cobb came into consciousness as a boy and acquired his prejudices of youth, formed everywhere west of the Alleghenys a back-stage setting. War overshadowed life in the American South and West in the '60's, '70's, '80's, and until the turn of the century. In this overshadowing of American life, the Confederate viewpoint, a nice blending of hiccupping nostalgia and conscious, deliberate, and downright self-deception, furnished the spiritual landscape of Paducah and points south of Kentucky to New Orleans, east to Charleston, and back to Louisville. As a Southerner—and he proves his right to be one by bragging on his ancestors for two chapters—Irvin Cobb comes in this book, and all of his books bringing something precious and lovable into American life and letters. Cobb came from a region in the United States, where wealth had been wiped out by the war, where poverty was a badge of honor. Indeed, the South developed a bumptious scorn of the acquisitive life, which the Yankee North was patterning for the whole country in the third quarter of the old century and in the first third of the new century. That bumptious Southern scorn of the acquisitive pattern of life is after all, the secret key to the understanding and enjoyment of Irvin Cobb's philosophy. That Southern attitude toward those predatory faculties of the Yankees in its very self makes for humor. A man who can look at a dollar without a spastic clutch for it it is, by all of the rules and tokens of the American game, slightly bughouse and conspicuously off his nut. So that Irvin Cobb, with the psychology of the busted South, coming into the American scene, north of the Mason and Dixon line, was laughable per se, ipse dixit, prima facie, and with all the giggleferious hereditaments thereunto appertaining!

Probably this attitude of absurdity which followed Irvin Cobb like a shadow molded his features. For his face provokes laughter in the mouths of the unthinking, who do not see that it is a serious, essentially sad, profoundly wise countenance. But some way Cobb can twist it, with scarcely a muscle's twitch, into a clowning grimace, without the slightest distortion. Mr. Cobb is known in his country as a humorist. But this story of his life as a newspaperman, from Paducah to Chicago to New York, from newspapers to magazines to books, and from books to the lecture platform to a place as a philosophic interpreter of our American scenes, is the story of a real man, a hardworking man, a conscientious man, tremendously impressed by the dignity and nobility of his profession.

This man's story of Exit Laughing is well worth reading, even if it were without embroidery, even if it lacked the gay, galluptious felicitation which sparkles from every page. Obviously the man whose unconscious portrait of dignity and sense of righteousness is delineated in this book, just had to be the friend of great figures of his generation. And so, as they pass in review here in these happy pages, we see Cobb and his friends walking in beauty, side by side, from the 1890s to the last tick of the clock of the 1940's. Probably no other biography that has been published in many years contains such vivid portraits of so many important Americans as this story of Irvin Cobb's. They are vivid because he has seen them, not as remote figures, but as faces across a table—maybe a dinner table, maybe a poker table, possibly a council table. He has seen them as friends, and he is certainly a friendly cuss. There is a strain of Newfoundland (and never poodle) in Irvin Cobb. Naturally, he never snaps, never barks, and never kicks dirt up behind him like a feist. He has aplomb and poise and carries his St. Bernard's rescuing whiskey flask to those in spiritual distress, with something like the sweet suavity of a duly registered practising angel. One can see that he brings out the best in his friends, and if he seems to be tromping through life on shell pink clouds of glory, with the rippling risibles of a happy humanity around him, it is because he makes his own environment.

I know of no book published in recent years which is so American as Exit Laughing. Its humor is Falstaffian. Shakespeare, on the whole, laughed with people, and not at them, and the Shakespearian quality of these pages, even if sometimes the rhetoric is a bit stagey, somewhat consciously mirthful, still, at the same time, is honest. It is always kind and wise.

Certainly this book could not have been written in Continental Europe, much less printed there. For it represents laughter, in life and in democracy. Here speaks the American spirit whose "sense of humor saves him whole!"