I picked up a first edition of The Best of H. Allen Smith in a used book store for the munificent sum of $2.50. Now, anytime you can find a “best of” volume you understand you have to be dealing with somebody who was once very popular. Smith was. In fact, in the introduction there’s a quote stating he has been called “the best-selling humorist since Mark Twain.” Considering that he wrote against the likes of James Thurber, Robert Benchley, and S. J. Perelman, that’s a heck of a statement. And probably true. He sold a million copies of each of his first several books, starting with Low Man on a Totem Pole, which gave the phrase to the language (again quoting the intro).
The best comparison today is Dave Barry. Both were newspapermen who collected their columns, wrote lots of funny books about odd subjects, did some popular novels of which one was made into a movie, and chronicled the weirder doings of the weirdest corners of Americana.
Smith was more or less forgotten by the time this Best Of collection appeared, in 1972, after a 30-year career. By coincidence, Barry has had a 30-year career and his name is beginning to fade as a humorist since he dropped his column in 2005. Fans would still have known both, of course, but humor has a short lifespan.
Do people still remember Smith at all? Could you say why or name a book of his? If so, do you think he was funny? Or is still?
Heck, I stumble across well-regarded-writers-for-their-time whom I have no clue about regularly. I remember reading about New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, reading a couple of his pieces and really being impressed. Turns out I was late to the game; of *course *he’s very highly regarded and part of the historic fabric of the New Yorker and the approach to topical reporting. No clue…
Rhubarb, the Ray Milland movie based on his novel, turns up on TMC from time to time.
I have The Compleat Practical Joker somewhere, and used to dream of pulling such outrageous stunts, although taking a wastebasket made of an elephant foot and making footprints in the snow to concoct a hoax about an escaped elephant just seems . . . over the top? I also have his chili cookbook somewhere.
I remember his name and I knew he was a humorist, but I don’t know if I ever actually read any of his stuff. Your post did, however, remind me of Try And Stop Me by Bennett Cerf, which I pored through many times as a kid, and had forgotten about for, well, probably decades.
I have several H. Allen Smith books. Life in a Putty Knife Factory, Lost in the Horse Latitudes, and To Hell in a Handbasket. I probably have the best of somewhere as well, but damn if I can find it.
Frankly, Smith might have been tossed aside by humor historians - a pretty tight-knit clan, incidentally - because he had no ties to the New Yorker, the alpha and omega for literary humorists in those times. Smith was really a middlebrow figure - a more or less unknown newspaperman until WW2, when his first book went bestseller and led to several more.
Yes. I’ve read The Best of…, and also his sf/satirical The Year of the Tail, which examines how our civilization would change if people had dof-like tails. Weird and interesting. If someone did it today, it’d be more risque, judging from the internet sites with this sort of fetish.
Low brow humor almost always outsells high-brow. Just as low-brow novels almost always outsell high-brow novels.
The automatic association today with humor and The New Yorker is a sore point of mine as well. I like lots of New Yorker humorists, but the humor world is full of others just as good.
Ah, well. It’s very expensive to collect the New Yorker humorists and very cheap to collect the rest. That makes me happy at least half the time.
I do. I had three or four of his books in the 60s/70s as a young lad.
The only two things I remember were how one of the rival High School was called Marfa.
They would shout out “Go Marfadites, Go!” at many of them games (and start fights.
“Marfadites” sounds like “Hermaphrodites” when you’re down south
The other thing is a joke about a guy who wound up in the hospital and retelling the story of how it came to be. Pale by today’s standards, but 40 years ago…racy stuff.
I read Low Man on a Totem Pole several times. The last time was about 5 years ago. It was his first book. A little dated, tho, with some of his schtick. Still, he was one of the greats.
I read quite a bit of H. Allen Smith a long time ago. The similarity to Dave Barry is evident, but Smith covered a lot more ground than Barry. For one thing, Smith interviewed a lot of Hollywood stars/starlets and other entertainers, focusing on the ludicrous side of the industry (he once got ahold of a Hollywood flacks’ guide to promoting clients, including fakery like drumming up a notable rose gardener in each town a starlet visited to present her with a rose he had supposedly named just for her).
I also remember his account of the flamboyant ace fighter pilot from Harlem who challenged Goering to an air duel, Smith’s leading a purple cow into a Manhattan hotel to flummox the person who wrote an irritating piece of doggerel, encountering the legendary financier J.P. Morgan on the street one day and calling out “Hiya, toots!” and other shenanigans that probably created outrage in his day.
Hubert Julian, “Black Eagle of Harlem” and personal pilot to Haile Selassie during the Italian-Ethoipian crisis.
Presumably Gelett Burgess, author of the purple-cow poem and creator of “The Goops.”
Probably not the John Pierpont Morgan, savior of the Crash of 1907. He died when Smith was but a small boy, and always carried a heavy cane to slash at miscreants, anyway.
I’ve read The Rebel Yell, a purported account of his travels in the Deep South to discover the genuine rebel yell and it’s origins. There were too many variants and claimants so the issue remained unresolved.
Old (50s, 60s) editions of the Readers’ Digest would sometimes feature his pieces, which was where I first read him.
Oh, my. The memories are flooding in. When I was a kid in the 1950s, my dad was a big fan of H. Allen Smith. There were several Smith books in the house, and I devoured them all. Smith was my third favorite writer back then (after James Thurber and Max Shulman). My favorite Smith book was The Compleat Practical Joker, which I reread until it literally fell apart.
