[Weales is an American novelist, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, he provides an overview of the humorous writings that appeared during the early years of the New Yorker.]

When the New Yorker was young, it could still laugh at itself. During its first year, Corey Ford contributed a series, "The Making of a Magazine," which presumably took the reader behind the scenes and showed him how Eustace Tilley managed to get the whole thing together. The joke, which was more characteristic than it was funny, was that the tone of the pieces was primly professional while the events described ranged from the purely amateur to the serenely absurd. In the early days, each anniversary number led off with an item in "The Talk of the Town" congratulating the magazine on still being alive; in 1927 (February 19), the note said, somewhat wryly, "We may even, in the next twelve months, develop a Righteous Cause or two and become Important." Not that an occasion was needed for a self-deprecating plug. In "A Reader's Tribute" in the issue of September 11, 1926, Elmer Davis compared the New Yorker favorably with "Uncle Cyrus Curtis's weekly." "What with the editorial page and Hergesheimer's stories," Davis explained, the Saturday Evening Post had become so heavy that it was not as useful as the New Yorker for killing mosquitoes: "the loathsome insects can always hear it coming in time to get out of the way." In one case—a Ralph Barton cartoon—an inside joke had serious implications about what the magazine wanted to be, what it was and what it would become. The cartoon appeared in the issue for December 12, 1925, when the magazine was less than a year old. It shows an attractive matron, wearing a typical short dress of the period; she appears to be dancing and, in the process, kicking over a cocktail shaker and toppling the cigarette out of her elegantly long holder. The caption: "Disturbing Effect of the Spirit of Christmas on the Old Lady in Dubuque, As Revealed in a Christmas Card Received by The New Yorker from That Worthy Dame." The reference, of course, is to the prospectus that Harold Ross wrote when the New Yorker was still in the making. Its most famous proclamation was that "The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque." Ross wanted "a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience," and, particularly in the early days, it was as relentlessly provincial as it had promised to be, mainly concerning itself with the minutiae of New York City life. Yet, as the Barton cartoon suggested, there was not that great a distance between the old lady in Dubuque and the boys and girls from Salt Lake City, Columbus, Ohio, and Mount Vernon, New York, who put out their insular journal. Within a few years, the best of the New Yorker contributors—first the humorists, then the short-story writers—found a following far beyond the Hudson River.

"I reflect that not everyone has little pieces published in magazines," wrote E. B. White in a "little piece" about the dangers of not wearing a hat. "Almost everyone does, but not everyone" ("No Hat," November 27, 1926). The first few years of the New Yorker show how right E. B. White was. Not only do those writers who became identified with the New Yorker appear—White, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, John O'Hara, Frank Sullivan—but there are frequent contributions from men like Elmer Davis and Gilbert Seldes, who went on to do other kinds of writing in other places. Actors as different as Leslie Howard and Groucho Marx turn up, being funny, or trying to be, and there are comic pieces from Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald. What's more, Hemingway's is genuinely amusing ("My Own Life," February 12,1927). The "little piece," the "casual," to borrow one of Ross's words, was not exactly a New Yorker invention. Judge, which Harold Ross edited for a while, and the old Life, and even College Humor and Vanity Fair, in their very different ways, had their versions of the "little piece." The minuscule piece, one might say, for some of the contributions in Life and Judge ran for no more than a paragraph or two, but then neither did some of the early offerings in the New Yorker. Ross's magazine finally turned its back on its nearest relatives, but not until it had borrowed the best of their writers and cartoonists, and an occasional idea as well.

As these other magazines faded away and the New Yorker solidified its position, the brief, humorous essay began to be identified as "New Yorker humor." The label is misleading if it is supposed to define with any exactitude a particular kind of prose work, for the range within the "little pieces" is great—from verbal slapstick to philosophic ruefulness. Still, there is a generic sameness within the variations. The types were established very early. The most common device was for the writer to take a recognizable current event as a place to begin and to build on it an intricate framework of fantasy or simple comment. In "The Seed of Revolt" (May 29, 1926), Robert Benchley contemplates the pedestrians' problem in a city beset by new construction, using as his starting point an actual fire on the wooden staging around a construction site; in "How I Became a Subway Excavator" (January 23,1926), the building of a new subway becomes the excuse for one of Frank Sullivan's characteristic descents—or ascents—into autobiographical lunacy. When the events were of more than local interest—national and international news stories, real or manufactured—the New Yorker writers returned to them again and again; thus, in the early years of the magazine there were a great many pieces that grew out of the Lindbergh flight, expeditions to the North Pole, the Hall-Mills case. Calvin Coolidge was the butt of a great many jokes in both the cartoons and the essays. In "Kamp Koolidge Nights" (June 5, 1926), Robert Benchley imagines the President putting on "that property pair of overalls that was used for photographic publicity purposes during the campaign" and telling stories around the campfire: "A reggeler ghost story about th' time up Bostin way when I run inter a hull tribe er strikin' policemen and held 'em at bay, singlehanded." The piece, however, is the usual one based on a newspeg, in this case the announcement that the Summer White House would be in the Adirondacks. Unless some such news story triggered the essay, Coolidge's name was likely to appear simply as one of a number of familiar names of the period—Herbert Bayard Swope, William Lyon Phelps, Grover Whalen—which for some reason the writers found funny the way radio comedians used to depend on a mention of Brooklyn or Sheboygan to get a laugh. There was obviously a deal of political acumen in the mock election analyses that Frank Sullivan wrote during the Hoover-Smith campaign, and his response to that election was the most partisan essay I can remember seeing in the early New Yorker. For the most part, New Yorker humor was not political.

Among New Yorker writers in search of a subject, the private incident was almost as popular as the public event. E. B. White got an amiable short piece ("Petit Dejeuner," September 18, 1926) out of trying and failing to explain to an uncomprehending French waiter how to serve the shredded wheat he was so delighted at having discovered in a grocery in Paris. James Thurber, working somewhat more broadly, edged into farce in his account of the aftermath of a pre-sailing party ("My Trip Abroad," August 6, 1927). This kind of piece, in the hands of White and Thurber, became a cross between personal anecdote and social comment. On the one hand, then, it shared the characteristics of those perennial pieces which catalogued the difficulties and the indignities which one faced when one went shopping, went abroad, tried to mail a letter, entered a bank, went to or gave a party, rented a summer cottage—the list is endless. Sometimes, in the hands of Robert Benchley or Donald Ogden Stewart, such material was newly funny; more often, even the masters nodded, and anyone leafing through the pages of the old New Yorker is likely to shudder and say, oh, no, here comes another embarkation party. On the other hand, the personal incident began to move toward the character sketch, the short story. Although E. B. White can make me believe he observed a real drunk when he went to see the Lunts in Caprice ("Interpretation," April 13, 1929), there is no real reason why the incidents that the humorists used could not be fictional. Certainly, very early in the New Yorker's history writers like Dorothy Parker, Arthur Kober and Marc Connelly began to invent not only the incidents but the voices that described them. A typical example is Arthur Kober's "Just a Pal" (March 31, 1928). A girl whom the New Yorker readers had met in an earlier Kober piece complains about her friend Florrie for whom she will never again do a favor. When Florrie was delayed in the subway on the way home from work, the narrator kindly agreed to go out with Florrie's boyfriend, just to save the waste of a ticket, but when she discovered that the show was at Carnegie Hall ("and, believe me, I saw a lotta foreign element"), she walked out at intermission and came home to tell Florrie how lucky she was to have missed it. She cannot understand either Florrie's tears or her ingratitude. Such sketches were a first step toward what came to be known as the New Yorker story.

Either the personal incident or the public event—more often the second—could be approached through parody, and that form became one of the New Yorker standards. It has always been an attractive genre to comic writers whether they really tried to imitate the original they were kidding or whether they went for burlesque and buried a recognizable source under a load of grotesque overstatement. The form was particularly popular in the 1920s, both in book-length works and in the comic magazines that preceded the New Yorker. Many of the writers who came over to Harold Ross's new magazine brought a reputation for parody with them. Donald Ogden Stewart is a prime example. His first book was A Parody Outline of History (1921), in which he recounts events in American history in a variety of styles, ranging from that of James Branch Cabell to that of Thornton W. Burgess; his second book, Perfect Behavior (1922), was a burlesque etiquette manual. There are parody elements in many of his New Yorker contributions—the practical advice article peeks through "How I Got My Rabbits to Lay" (April 7, 1928) and "How We Made Both Ends Meet in the Middle" (April 28, 1928)—but there were so many parodists in the New Yorker pages that Stewart was barely noticeable in the crowd. Parke Cummings turned up with a description of a bridge contest in a competent sports page style ("Clubs Is Trumps," March 13, 1926), and Nunnally Johnson described a bathroom whistler as though he were writing a music review ("Good Clean Fun," May 15, 1926). Most forms of popular journalism and literature were cycled through the parody mill, and, of course, the more serious writers were fair game. One of James Thurber's early contributions to the magazine was "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" (December 24, 1927), a version of Clement Moore's Christmas poem retold "In the Ernest Hemingway Manner." Hemingway's own New Yorker piece was ostensibly a parody of Frank Harris's My Life and Loves. As a critic, I admit a certain difficulty with the parodists. I admire individual pieces that range from E. B. White's "Worm Turning" (October 1, 1927), a take-off on Alexander Woollcott at his worst—which could be most anytime—to Peter De Vries's parody of Elizabeth Bowen ("Touch and Go," January 26, 1952). Yet, it is not a genre I warm to. Corey Ford's "New Light on the Rothstein Theory" (March 2, 1929), which discusses the traffic problem in scientific terminology, is an efficient, restrained piece that sticks to its initial conception, but, for me, it is dead after one paragraph. On the other hand, Ring Lardner's "Miss Sawyer, Champion" (September 10, 1927), which begins as a parody of tennis reporting and ends somewhere near surrealism, is the kind of comic writing that remains alive although it kills its first parodic impulse as it grows. New Yorker writers, depending on whether they wanted to demonstrate their ear or their imagination, vacillated between restraint and exuberance in their use of parody; particularly in the early days, they tended to walk on the wild side.

Although the best of the New Yorker humorists developed unmistakable literary personalities and the styles to express them, there is a storehouse of comic devices and verbal tricks which most of them used on occasion. The non sequitur, for instance, and its cousin, the irrelevant aside. Listen to the parenthetic remark in this sentence from Robert Benchley's "Sex is Out" (December 19, 1925): "According to Dr. Max Hartmann (I used to have a dentist named Dr. Hartmann, but he was a dentist) there is no such thing as absolute sex." Or take this sentence from Ring Lardner's "Miss Sawyer, Champion": "Yesterday's event was attended by the largest crowd of the season, attracted not only because it was the championship final, but also by the fact that the former Miss Stevens's birthplace in Portugal gave the match an international odor." The line almost makes sense, and then one realizes that its spurious plausibility is completely undone by the fact that there is no Miss Stevens anywhere else in the article. There is something so gentle about E. B. White and something so logical about his writing that it takes a second or two to recognize his personal variation on the standard non sequitur in a line like, "Let a man's leg be never so shapely, sooner or later his garters wear out" ("Garter Motif," June 5, 1926).

Repetition is another of the comic devices. The narrator in Dorothy Parker's "Dialogue at Three in the Morning" (February 13, 1926) is a little bit drunk which might explain her saying, "Trouble with me is, I'm too kindhearted. That's what everybody always told me. 'Trouble with you is, you're too kind-hearted,' they said." But almost exactly the same line can be found in Frank Sullivan's "How I Became a Subway Excavator," published a month earlier: "The folks, I guess, think I'm more interested in digging that subway than I am in my job. 'You're more interested in that subway than you are in your job,' they tell me." The joke, I assume, lies in the almost confessional tone of the lines, the suggestion that the alteration of a word or two or the movement from indirect to direct address brings with it a new revelation. Another favorite repetition joke can also be found in the work of Frank Sullivan. He has always been obsessive about fashionable names, as his annual holiday poem for the New Yorker indicates, but in an early piece, a mock society column ("The Costume Balls," March 13,1926), his list of celebrities is designed so that certain names keep appearing. The device is not simply comic, as the repetition of any sounds might be, but satiric as well. The implication is that certain figures manage to elbow their way to a real lion's share of public attention. Elmer Davis makes this specific in his use of the joke. In "Now It Can Be Told" (October 16, 1926), an eye witness gives a list of the famous people on hand the night of the Hall-Mills murders. After mentioning Herbert Bayard Swope six times, she says, "Oh, dear, I've gone and mentioned Mr. Swope twice; but really that is precisely the impression which he makes upon me." Still another variation in the repetition technique is the line that keeps returning like a refrain. In a parody of syndicated columns that peddle exotic New York to local papers ("Metropolitan Nature Fakers," July 23,1927), Nunnally Johnson describes each of his exciting New Yorkers as "a collector of rare first editions and an admirer of Nietzsche." He caps the gag by changing the wording the last time the line appears; his chorus girl "has an excellent collection of rare first editions including one of 'Thus Spake Zarathustra.'" The switcheroo—as they say in show business—may not be all that funny, but Johnson's comic instincts are sound; the correct finish to that kind of refrain is to deny and fulfill the audience expectations at the same time.

Another popular comic device and one that may have had a deleterious effort on the New Yorker at its most serious is the use of excessive incidental detail. Originally, of course, the detail itself was supposed to be funny. Thus Frank Sullivan introduced a "Mrs. Maud Fetterdetsch, tester of police whistles" into "How I Became a Subway Excavator," and Corey Ford, writing a fictional history of the magazine ("The Anniversary of a Great Magazine"), turned out this sentence: "In those halcyon days, for example, a stage-line started at the Public Library (destroyed by fire in 1889, owing to a carelessly-tossed cigarette), circled Bryant Park to avoid the construction which had just started, crossed over to Broadway and ran down James G. Blaine, after which it was discontinued." The honorable ancestry of that kind of comic line can be seen in Crabtree's description of a pistol shot in The School for Scandal: "the ball struck against a little bronze Shakespeare that stood over the fireplace, grazed out of the window at a right angle, and wounded the postman, who was just coming to the door with a double letter from Northamptonshire." That kind of extended line was not the only, not even the most conventional way of playing with detail; as often as not, a single phrase, a specific name or location would be imbedded in an ordinary sentence. When Corey Ford mentioned "a prominent manufacturer named Meebles" in one of his essays on traffic problems ("How D'You Get What Way?" January 9, 1926), he probably thought the name Meebles funny—which it may be to some people—but the important part of the phrase is the man's occupation which gives a bogus authority to the whole invention. Perhaps a better example can be found in E. B. White's "Interview with a Sparrow" (April 9, 1927): "I stopped a sparrow recently at the Seventy-second Street entrance to the Park and put the question bluntly." In this case, the exact location plays against the unspecific "recently" and the whole air of accident—as though he had just happened to meet the sparrow—and gives the fantasy an almost repertorial substance. The New Yorker's preoccupation with detail turned finally to the kind of cataloguing which now makes the magazine almost unreadable. I picked up a recent issue (February 12, 1972) and found an item in "The Talk of the Town" which began, "Having been invited by the Brody Corporation, a hydra-headed association of restaurant operators, whose responsibilities include L'Etoile, Gallagher's Steak House, and the Rainbow Room, to drop in at the last of these during …" The sentence went on for another half column. And it was not even meant to be funny. If Frank Sullivan had written it thirty years ago, it would have been funny and a great deal easier to read aloud.

I might have used Corey Ford's description of the stage-line that ran down James G. Blaine as an example of something other than the New Yorker absorption in detail. It also represents a kind of conscious overwriting used for comic effect. Sometimes the elaboration comes from the misuse of metaphor, as in this line, also from Corey Ford: "All too late the lily of truth, crushed to earth beneath the heel of Industry, tears the bandage from its eyes to behold the handwriting on the wall" ("The Bleakest Job," May 29, 1926). In time, such lines almost disappeared from the casuals, but they turned up as filler at the bottom of the page in the series of accidentally funny newsbreaks labeled "Block That Metaphor." Oddly enough, the pun, one of the standard forms of comic ornamentation, appeared infrequently in the early days of the New Yorker. One of Wolcott Gibb's first pieces was built around the phrase "neither beer nor there," ("On Working That Line Into the Conversation," February 25, 1928), but it did not really try to inflict the pun on the reader; instead, it was a first-person account of a man's attempt to work the phrase into a conversation and his failure when the occasion arose. It was not until a master punner arrived that the form came into its own in the New Yorker. Of all the outrages committed by Peter De Vries, I prefer the response he swears he never made to the woman who said she saw the geese fly south: "Migratious!" ("Compulsion," January 17, 1953). The master of ornamentation at the New Yorker, at least since the 1930s, has been S. J. Perelman. His rich and scarcely appropriate vocabulary is one reason why his prose is so lush, but a look at a reasonably commonplace sentence of his will show that his effects are also syntactical. He can take the simplest sentence and convert it into a grandiosity by stuffing it with clause upon clause, phrase upon phrase. "Every woman cherishes a dream" is the kind of direct declarative sentence that might be an appropriate opening for a casual, but look what happens to it in S. J. Perelman's hands: "Every woman worth her salt, and even the few unsalted ones I have known, cherishes somewhere in her heart midway between the auricle and the ventricle a lovely, pastel-tinted dream." There is no more compelling indication of the variety in the New Yorker "little piece" than to consider this kind of prose alongside that of E. B. White and James Thurber, who, as the years passed, became increasingly spare in their effects.

Most of the familiar New Yorker names have appeared in the examples I have cited, but my attempt to define the genre and the shared literary devices necessarily buries the individual in the group. There is hardly time in a short lecture to discuss each of the writers, but let me take a few minutes to comment on some of those who seem to me most characteristic of the magazine and its humor. Since most of them wrote for other publications as well, a few of my examples come from non-New Yorker pages, but so mild an impurity should not obscure the general picture. When Donald Ogden Stewart and Nunnally Johnson went off to Hollywood in the early 1930s, they practically ceased to write except for the films. Their identification with the New Yorker was necessarily brief, and I doubt that either man's name would occur to anyone who grew up with the magazine in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet, Johnson's workmanlike pieces represent the kind of occasional essay that was the magazine's stock-in-trade in the 1920s, and he left behind him at least one magic line. I have still not mastered the implications of a sentence of his that begins, "This fact was brought home, or even worse, early last Thursday morning…" ("Good Clean Fun"). Stewart was at his best in the strange historical essays in which he leavened a demented family chronicle with a touch of social comment. In "The President's Son" (December 10, 1927), an illogical extension of Nan Britton's revelations about President Harding, Stewart tells an idyllic tale of the meetings between his mother and an unidentified president—first, at a White Elephant sale in New Britain, Connecticut; then, at Grant's Tomb; finally, in a tree during the Johnstown Flood. This kind of invention has its verbal equivalent in lines like, "But daisies, like the cat who bit John D. Rockefeller, Jr., are often 'all too human,' and this year I'm going to tell" ("After Christmas—What?" December 31,1927). Frank Sullivan worked a similar vein when he first began to write for the New Yorker. For instance, in "Three Methods of Acquiring Loam" (May 26, 1928), he converts the sidetrack into the main road. He explains, almost parenthetically, that the British stripped Manhattan of its loam when they evacuated it during the Revolutionary War, which leads him to Luther Burbank and his separation of "hoats" into "two distinct varieties … hay and oats." At another point in the same essay, illustrating the way to show your friends that you would like loam as a gift, he writes a conversation which somehow turns into an attempt to pick up a girl on Fifth Avenue and, then, into a musical comedy with a love song which ends incredibly with "They needed a tenor in Heaven so they took Caruso away." One of Sullivan's later inventions is Mr. Arbuthnot, the cliche expert, who appears in a great many dialogue pieces. The character is a treasurehouse of bromidic answers—a testimony to Sullivan's good ear—but the Arbuthnot exchanges are too restrained to show Sullivan at his best. He is most himself at his most irrelevant—for instance, when, apropos of nothing at all, he suddenly says, "Succotash had not yet, however, come into its own" ("Down the Ages with the Social Center," March 6, 1926).

Presumably most of the New Yorker humorists began writing in college, but Corey Ford and S. J. Perelman somehow stayed closer to their campus origins. Ford, who had edited the Jester at Columbia, went downtown and began to contribute to Judge, Life, Vanity Fair and, as soon as it was founded, the New Yorker. Perelman came down from Brown, where he had edited the Brown Jug, to work for Judge and to contribute to Life among others. It was not until the 1930s that he began to write for the New Yorker. The two humorists differ in that Ford worked in a variety of styles, adapting himself to the immediate needs of the situation and the subject; Perelman early adopted a personal style that has hardly changed between the 1920s and the 1970s. What the two men have in common is that the work of both of them seems very strained; it gives off an air of conscious cleverness that harks back to the editorial rooms of the college humor magazines from which they came. It is this quality in Ford's work, I assume, that kept him from building a large following as so many of the New Yorker writers did—this quality, plus an almost complete absence of literary personality. S. J. Perelman, on the other hand, has—or once had—legions of admirers. If I may wax autobiographical, for a moment, I was once among them. In my college days in the late 1940s, when humor magazines were just beginning to die, I was a Perelman enthusiast at a time when I was no more than an admirer of Thurber and White. I now find it very difficult to read period Perelman. When he calls himself "the present troubadour" ("Whose Lady Nicotine?") or says that "Mr. Farber recently sat himself down" ("Hell in the Gabardines"), I squirm a little and try to catch a glimpse of the old imagination behind the fancy wordwork. Perelman is probably in better control in most of his pieces than are Donald Ogden Stewart and Frank Sullivan in the essays I applauded earlier, but a controlled outrageousness has its limits. What he lacks, I think, is a genuine wildness.

It is not particularly evident in his first contributions to the New Yorker, but Robert Benchley is the comic in this group who developed the firmest personality. That may be because the character he created—the voice in most of his pieces—had a life both on and off the page. He was a busy and successful journalist in 1923 when he went on stage, in the third Music Box Revue, and first performed his famous monologue, "The Treasurer's Report." In 1928, the "Report" was filmed and Benchley went on to make more than forty film shorts in which he tried, with a kind of placid desperation, to make something simple seem complicated; during the 1940s, he played variations on his likable bumbler in feature films. The Benchley character was also clearly delineated in the caricature that Gluyas Williams created to illustrate the many Benchley books. More important, of course, is that the character emerges in the short pieces that Benchley continued to write even after he became a movie star. The character is a little vain, always willing to strut a few steps before he falls into a real or imaginary manhole. He is a touch ponderous as he tries to explain things, and he is constantly viewing with mild alarm. Embarrassment is almost a disease with him. He is sometimes fictional—working in the planetarium with Mr. MacGregor, the old Navy man—but more often simply an after-image of the author himself. As I have described him, he is not unlike a great many other comic characters, the little man beset by the intricacies of life, catching whatever transient pleasures he can. There is, however, a dark side to this man. He would never say so directly, but mortality and an unfriendly universe are also after him. This is clear in "My Trouble," in which he wonders "Do all boys of 46 stop breathing when they go to bed?" and in "Duck, Brothers!" in which he is quite certain that "a full-fledged rain of ten-ton flame-balls" is heading directly for him: "I know where I'm not wanted." These pieces are as funny as the lighter ones, but they do have a disquieting undertone, which may indicate that Benchley was a more serious comic writer than he was ever willing to admit.

James Thurber and E. B. White are the two humorists most closely associated with the New Yorker. One could almost say that they were created by the magazine, but they in turn helped create it. It was their work that separated the "little piece" from the slapstick of the early days, that let it turn gentle, ruminative, even somber on occasion. E. B. White came to the New Yorker first, when it was only a few months old, and, as Marc Connelly once said, "brought the steel and the music to the magazine." In the early days, White did almost everything, from theater reviews to cartoon captions, but it was in the casuals that he established his authority. There is a sentimental side to the man which expresses itself in spongy lyricism and the kind of rue that grows in Dorothy Parker's garden. Most of that sentimentality was happily milked off in the verse that White wrote in the 1920s. In his prose, that quality was contained, became genuine sentiment, expressed an affection for places and people and the time of day that few other writers have been able to equal. White was quite capable of fooling around in the Frank Sullivan manner. In the collection of society notes that he calls "Fin de Saison—Palm Beach" (April 7, 1934), he uses all the familiar devices—funny names, ludicrous juxtaposition, abrupt irrelevancy—and the result is one of the funniest burlesques to come out of the New Yorker. Yet, that is not the kind of piece which one identifies with E. B. White. The best of his work is in one of two forms, both allied to the short story—the personal anecdote and the parable. He came to the first quite early. In 1925, he made a characteristic piece ("Child's Play," December 19) out of having buttermilk spilled on him in a restaurant. He manipulated the material more obviously than he probably would have in later years, but he clearly established both a sense of the situation and the character of the narrator—qualities which would continue to mark his anecdotal pieces. In the parables, he displays greater range. It is wry intelligence that shows through "The Wings of Orville" (August 8, 1931), in which the sparrow's wife comes to share her husband's crackpot dream; in "The Door" (March 25, 1939), the irony turns frightening as his narrator's world becomes the rat's cage of the behavioral scientist.

It was 1927 when James Thurber first turned up in the pages of the New Yorker—with two poems that are of historical interest only. With his next appearance, "An American Romance" (March 5, 1927), the Thurber tone—or one of them—was already established. "Romance" tells the story of a "little man in an overcoat that fitted him badly at the shoulders" who took refuge in a revolving door and would not come out until he had become a public hero. "'I did it for the wife and children,' he said." That piece and another early one about a man who tries to take a straw hat to the cleaners ("The Psyching of Mr. Rogers," April 27, 1929) have an undertone of pain and panic that weaves all through Thurber's work. It surfaces lightly in "A Note at the End" of My Life and Hard Times (1933), and it grows pervasive in Thurber's last years, as Further Fables for Our Time (1956) indicates. There are other Thurbers who have to live with the dark humorist of the Fables. There is the word crank who can be traced from the early series on "Our Own Modern English Usage" through the dialect games of "What Do You Mean It Was Brillig?" (January 7, 1939) to the children's author of The Wonderful 0 (1957). There is the writer who, beginning with "The Thin Red Leash" in 1927 (August 13), has described the most unlikely company of dogs in modern letters. There is the autobiographer of My Life and Hard Times, who went again to his past in The Thurber Album (1952) and built solid memoirs on ground that had already supported some of the best and funniest comic writing in America. It seems to me that what all these Thurbers have in common is the writer who insisted on being rational in the cause of irrationality—at least, insofar as that word can stand for fantasy, variety, openness, surprise and a healthy distrust of all rules. That Thurber is implicit in the cartoonist whose characters hear seals bark, crouch on bookcases, "come from haunts of coot and hern." He is explicit in Let Your Mind Alone (1937), the mock-serious discussion of popular psychology in which he says, "The undisciplined mind … is far better adapted to the confused world in which we live.… This is, I am afraid, no place for the streamlined mind."

The world is more confused in the 1970s than it was in the 1930s, but today there is apparently not even room for the undisciplined mind. At least, there is no room for the kind of comic writing that these humorists represent. S. J. Perelman still turns up in the pages of the New Yorker, but he is like a literary Rip Van Winkle come home to a village that does not recognize him. The magazine prints occasional casuals by Woody Allen, who out-Perelmans Perelman, and by Roger Angell, among others, but it has grown turgid and heavy, it has—as that 1927 note suggested—developed "a Righteous Cause or two and become Important." Hardly the home for the "little piece" that E. B. White had in mind when he contemplated the dangers of going hatless. Nor is there any other home. In a world in which there are fewer magazines and in which the remaining ones tend to be very serious or fakily flashy or aimed at a non-general audience, no magazine editor wants the kind of comic writing that made the New Yorker famous. No newspaper editor, either. Except for a few regional columnists, the remaining newspaper humorists are almost completely political. Times change, tastes change. The New Yorker humorists have gone the way of Mark Twain and Mr. Dooley and Artemus Ward, into the libraries or into oblivion. It is my job as scholar and critic to record the fact, coldly, and pass on. But somehow this sounds like a lament. That may not be inappropriate. Not only has a kind of comic writing disappeared, but an attitude as well. "Quo Vadimus?" (May 24, 1930) is a case in point. In that piece, E. B. White stops a man in East Thirty-fourth Street and asks "Quo vadis?" He chides the man for giving his time and energy to pointless activities that obscure his simple wants, but before the piece ends it turns back on the author, sees him as one with the harried man and justifies the plural of the title. What all these writers share is a sense of complicity. Even when they are not their own subjects, there is an implicit recognition that only a fine line separates the satirist from his target, the humorist from his subject, the teller from the told. They know that all of us are clumsy, confused, vain and mortal, and that we build the wrong monuments to the wrong gods on the wrong quicksand. Perhaps one can no longer know that and still retain a deep affection for imperfect man and his unlikely works.

For all I know, there may no longer be an old lady in Dubuque.