This is very cool. My dad was a huge Max Schulman fan. Is he forgotten? He had a lot of fame and success in his time.
Your website has just sucked an hour and a half of my valuable and busy Saturday morning away. I hope you feel proud of yourself.
Some of the names have travelled to Australia - Chick Sale’s Specialist still turns up in secondhand bookshops, Perelman and Cerf ring a bell. Definitely forgotten here, if ever really known. A few locals I can think of, who were mainly newspaper columnists - Ron Saw, Phillip Adams [who retired from broadcasting a few days ago after 33 years on air after a whole other career doing other amazing things] - have produced compilations of newspaper columns in book form. And most comedians seem to have a book deal in their orbit [now replaced by a childrens book series].
Glad you [or Armour] mentioned and credited 1066 and all that, which remains unsurpassed, I think. Would it be the most re-purposed parody of all time?
Probably Shulman is sadly forgotten. He invented Dobie Gillis! And wrote the most elaborate erudite scripts for the television show I loved.
I think that all the books he wrote should be classified as fiction, though. I have several but they’re not part of the collection.
Could be. That would be an interesting subject to research. I have several titles that include “and all that” even beyond the other imitators. The book came out in 1930 and imitators appeared in 1931!
How do you like Milt Gross? I once considered calling myself “Richie Dot Dope” 
I have Nize Baby (which, now that I look closely at it, is a first edition, though not marked that way in my database) but I’m not a fan of dialect humor. I have to include it because it was so dominant in pre-WWI humor. The number of Yiddish dialect humorists referenced in this thread surprises me.
To be fair, Gross’ career started after the war and he grew famous in a short time. “Gross Exaggerations in the Dumbwaiter” was a syndicated newspaper column before they were collected into Nize Baby the next year. Those might just as well be labeled short fiction as Montague Glass’ work, but somehow they seem different, perhaps because they don’t have identifiable named characters.
Rube Goldberg, BTW, is another person mostly remembered as a cartoonist, but he did several books that are clearly humor.
Kinky Friedman just died. Here’s a gift obituary from the New York Times.
They mention his column for the iconoclastic Texas Monthly magazine, but not that the early works were gathered in two books - ‘Scuse Me While I Whip This Out and Texas Hold 'Em; - and two later ones that were the same but from more sources - Kinky’s Friedman’s Guide to Texas Etiquette and What Would Kinky Do?
Speaking of unsuspected bestsellers. His mysteries sold 6,000,000 copies, says the Times. Nice.
I have,several Richard Armour books. I think The Classics Reclassified is,my favorite.
Have you considered adding Thorne Smith?
I remember thinking that The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship by Stephen Potter was hilarious when I read it long ago.
Another annoying prolific character. But he’s a novelist, so while I have several of his books they’re peripheral.
He followed that up with Lifemanship, One-upmanship, and Supermanship. He goes into British and Canadian authors, and the core collection is limited to Americans.
I didn’t make clear earlier that the core collection comprises books of or about 20th Century American prose humor, which can include books about screen humor. I drew lots of lines to keep me sane. No fiction, no joke books, no academic maunderings, no books of pictures with funny captions, no one-liner Bierce-like definitions, no books of cartoons or comic strips, no 19th century, and a stoppage point in the 21st century for those who don’t cross the boundary. These were rules set hard and fast that I broke only when I felt like it. That doesn’t mean I don’t have books in those categories - I have hundreds - but they are not core.
If those are your boundaries, it would have been useful for you to include that in the opening paragraph of your website.
Sorry. That’s something so basic I don’t think about it anymore. One’s hobby is always a sinkhole.
I looked to see if the site said whether fiction was included, but if there was anything about that, I missed it.
I’m getting valuable feedback about my site here and I thank you all for it. Changes will be forthcoming.
I don’t know how practical it would be, but if any of the books have been digitized in any way, it would be great to have links to them. (Or, yes, if you could possibly digitize them yourself, but I know that’s a large undertaking.) The ones out of copyright might be available on like Google Books or the Internet Archive (despite their recent troubles).
A few are on Gutenberg.org, but it’s hit or miss, and only up to 1929. But that’s a good idea. One more to add to the rework pile.
Franklin P. Adams and Alexander Woollcott also come to mind from the Algonquin Table and the New Yorker. Carolyn Wells did some nice pastiches of mysteries along with editing humorous verse collections.
The Algonquin Group is totally out of fashion today, but they were the bee’s knees when I was younger. I have everything about them, I think. But the individuals make for harder decisions. I have a ton of F.P.A., probably more than meet my strict criteria and I’ll have to decide what to keep. What I don’t have is a little thing called Men I’m Not Married To (bound dos-a-dos with) Women I’m Not Married To That was written with a young Dorothy Parker. One copy is available on the internet. For $3500. That’s outside my wife’s strict criteria.
Woollcott doesn’t have any books I can stuff inside the category of humor. He wrote on too many serious things and collected them all together. I have several biographies of him, though. How I reconcile the two is a mystery to me.
Wells is also a problem. As far as I can tell she produced no books of her own humor, not even collections. She certainly wrote a few parodies, the vast majority of which are of poems. She did some prose parodies but all seem to be all of Sherlock Holmes. I have all the collections of Holmes parodies I know of and I’m sure they include some by Wells. She may have written some books intended to be genre parodies but I can’t track down any individual titles.
I’m trying to whittle down an inchoate mess into a reasonably choate collection. At night I scream into my pillow.
Twenty years ago, when I was a personal property appraiser, I went to assess a collection in Kentland, Indiana of photographs, books and other properties owned by George Ade, for the purpose of starting a George Ade Museum. A quick check on Google indicates they’re still trying. I’d read all of the Fables in Slang series, so they were happy I was a fan, but there wasn’t anything of real note in the entire collection, sad to say.
Wow. I keep reading about the efforts towards a George Ade Museum at Hazelden. The website seems stalled in 2022, although they announced they had achieved 255% of a funding goal. Wonder where the money is. Certainly, a trove of properties valueless for others would be priceless as the core of a museum recreating Ade’s life. Do you know if they kept the collection?
BTW, if you read all the Fables, you’re a better man than I.