Okay, so topical humor doesn’t always age very well. That said, I just don’t get what was so funny about Will Rogers. To me, the folksy little observances that he made fall flatter than the Oklahoma plains he was born on. Some examples:
“Don’t ever tell us Friday is unlucky. Didn’t Congress adjourn today?”
“The big blow in Florida was a great local misfortune, but the big blow in the Senate was a national calamity. Even the Red Cross can’t repair the damage. We got wind where we had paid to get wisdom…”
(About Coolidge vetoing farm relief)
“Put him on a farm with the understanding he has to make his own living off it, and I bet he will give the farmers relief next year. I offer mine for the experiment, and if he makes a go of it, he is not a president, he is a magician.”
“Income tax has made more liars out of Americans than golf.”
“I belong to no organized party. I’m a Democrat.”
And like that. Um, ha-ha…I guess.
Now, I know it’s not because I don’t find old humor funny. I’ve laughed at plenty of thirties comedies, and even further back, I find Mark Twain fairly amusing. I loved Twain’s savage critique of James Fenimore Cooper’s works for example.
But this guy? He was hugely popular back in his day. I just don’t get it.
i think that if you had the news of the day from newspapers, radio and newsreels then there might be a lot of linkage and then humor. late night tv talk show monologues make sense when they are current.
Hey, some of those examples sound exactly like something that Jay Leno would say. Maybe blandly cynical humor will always get enough of an audience to be popular.
First, listening to any random grouping of late night comedians will find the same jokes being made with the same punchlines. As long as they’re doing topical one-liners you’ll find an amazing amount of duplication. It doesn’t matter who’s the hip one to the kiddie-pool set. Topical one-liners haven’t changed since radio days.
Second, they had to learn that these particular types of jokes could be made and the form in which it could be made. Rogers created that form. There are earlier individual examples - there always are - but the form itself was coalesced by Rogers. I consider him to have invented stand-up comedy in the modern sense. He stood wildly out from the other vaudevillians when he debuted the form in 1915.
Most of the material we have from him today are from his newspaper columns, which he ground out like sausages, often backstage between performances. Nobody considers them his best work. Even so, I think they hold up better than the famous radio comics’ monologues that were also ground out weekly for two decades. His material was sharper, fresher, and more interesting. You need to compare his work to theirs, or to other newspaper columnists. You mention “thirties comedies” but I assume those are movies. A different form, with a different type of humor.
None of this will make you laugh any more than I can find anything funny today in the columns of Franklin Pierce Adams (FPA) who was by far the leading newspaper columnist of that era. But I think that Rogers is actually underrated today. He invented a field of humor. That’s amazing.
And “I belong to no organized party. I’m a Democrat.” is a timeless, great line, still true after all these years.
Picture playing a random monologue by Johnny Carson from say 1973.
How funny do you think his topical jokes would be 40 years later?
Some might raise a chuckle, but most would not fly.
I remember watching a Robin Williams show some time after 9/11 (the one where he goes on about visiting Scotland, among other things) and thought it was the most hilarious thing I’d ever seen. And then I went and looked up a transcript online, and reading it on the screen was painfully un funny. So delivery may have had something to do with it too, I think.
ETA: This one – imagine just reading it on the page.
Yes, they are pretty funny too especially considering Will Rogers was inventing that form. They seem a little cliche now but that is only because so many people copied or made variations on them later. I thought most of the examples given in the OP were funny.
Frank Deford wrote back in the 1970s that comedy sometimes loses its appeal over the ages. The bon mots of the Algonquin Round Table strike many as leaden and forced. Abbott and Costello had a routine about a horse where “the mudder had no fodder” which brought Costello to tears on the screen. Deford wonders “who laughed at this?”. Yet lots of people did-they were top 10 screen draws for a decade and number one for 1942".
How sure are you that, say, Jon Stewart or Bill Maher’s political quips or rants will still make anyone laugh in 60 or 70 years?
Stewart or Maher would be foolish even to think in those terms. Their job is to say things that seem pithy, relevant and funny NOW. If their great grandkids still find their jokes funny, well, that’s a bonus.
The funniest thing about Will Rogers today, is that Oklahoma City named its airport after him, even though he died in a plane crash. Funnier still, the other OKC airport is named after the pilot, who also died in the crash.
If Two Many Cats is reading the jokes, I’d say that was at least half of it. Will Rogers had great timing. It’s hard to be sure from the OP whether or not she’s (he’s?) seen clips, though.
He traditionally used to deliver his jokes while being tossed on a blanket by obese women dressed as fruit. Doesn’t sound funny today, but in 1930 it was a riot! (Or I might be thinking of Cordell Hull.)
OP, it’s downright bizarre that you would find Mark Twain funny but not Will Rogers. You can find the same themes running through their work.
For example, take the first quote you gave. As background, here’s Mark Twain–
“No man’s life, liberty, or property, is safe while the legislature is in session.”
And here’s Will Rogers–
“Don’t ever tell us Friday is unlucky. Didn’t Congress adjourn today?”
“Another popular humorist of the day was Will Rogers, who used to do an act where he’d twirl a lasso and absolutely slay his audiences with such wry observations as: ‘The only thing I know is what I read in the papers.’ Ha-ha! Get it? Neither do we. Must have been something he did with the lasso.” Dave Barry Slept Here
Successful humorists are the mirror images of how their audiences like to think of themselves. Will Rogers’ liked to think they still retained the folksy wisdom that was receding with urbanization; the Jewish comedians of the mid-20th C. congratulated their audience for working their way out of the tenements; Johnny was for all the guys who were kids in the deprivation of the Depression and regimentation of the war while keeping their wits and getting ahead; Dave and Jay the guys who went through all the turbulence of yuppie corporate culture since the 80’s and still landed on their feet. Similarly all mythologizing, but not interchangeable from one era to another.
Twain’s written delivery is better than what I’ve read of Will Rogers, in my opinion. However, in this example you’ve quoted, neither example is terribly funny, although they express the same idea.
Twain was better with an extended story anyway. There’s a passage in Innocents Abroad where he and his buddies have some fun with a tour guide who shows them a letter written by Christopher Columbus. Twain and company do nothing but criticize the penmanship, bewildering the guide who expects them to be awed. Now that’s funny.