They’re Brits.
Well, “great” is promotional hype, based mostly on book sales. Easier to put forward the idea that someone that topped the bestseller list shouldn’t be forgotten.
Of course Mae West. I have all the biographies, I think. Her original books are either plays or fiction, though. Unlike Fields, she never wrote comic essays. I have Life with Father and Life with Mother by Clarence Day. He’s an author on my list to fill in, but first printings of his books are hard to come by.
You threw a curve at me; I had never heard of her. When I looked her up I saw that her first chapter was indeed humorous. But the farther she got into the book (available on Gutenberg) the straighter she presented the information.
Fine authors, not humor book writers.
A number of very good books have recently come out on the history of female comedians and Moms Mabley is prominently featured in them. I don’t know of any book just of her, though. A huge gap. Dick Gregory is in the same position; lots in books on comic history, no good biographies. I have two biographies of Burt Williams, though.
How about Molly Katz, best known for Jewish as a Second Language? (Apparently, she also wrote New York as a Second Language and 101 Reasons to Dump Your Man and Get a Cat.)
Great! I wasn’t aware of her, but she’s right on target.
BTW, you mention ETAOIN SHRDLU in your article about Corey Ford, saying, correctly, that it is “taken from the most-frequency used letters of the alphabet.” (I only just noticed that you probably meant to write “frequently” instead of “frequency.”)
You probably know this, but the main reason anyone knows about ETAOIN SHRDLU is that those are the equivalent of the “home keys” on a Linotype machine. When operators made a mistake that was most easily fixed by removing the entire line of type, they would run their fingers down those two columns of the keyboard.
The type setter who was laying out the slugs was supposed to see ETAOIN SHRDLU and pull that line. This page discusses the practice and shows an example that slipped through to publication.
Fixed!
I was also going to mention that I owned a copy of Ford’s The Time of Laughter for decades and carried it with me across several moves without ever reading more than a few pages, if that. Finally, in our last move, from a large house to a small one, when we had to divest ourselves of a lot of stuff, I gave it away. (Or at least I’m pretty sure I did. I’d have to go root through a bunch of boxes in the attic to check.)
After reading your article, I wish I still had it. 
Sorry for your loss. I’ve read the book multiple times; it’s strangely addictive. Nothing else creates or recreates a sense of how much fun that era must have been for the lucky few who got to be at the center of the Algonquin/New Yorker/humorist world for that short period. Of course New York has had multiple periods when squads of eccentrics built a little bubble inside the multitudes and are duly written about decades later. This is one I care about, or at least aspired to when I was young, and nothing ever erases that.
Just discovered the thread and the site and seeing Will Cuppy right there in the front page I know I’m looking forward to what else I might discover in it.
Missed that, sorry, am idjit!
Hope you find some pleasant surprises as well.
Still enjoying the site, and refreshing my memories with many of these.
Yesterday at a yard sale I purchased a somewhat tattered copy of Abner Dean’s It’s A Long Way To Heaven (1945). I know that’s cartoons, and not prose humor, but I wondered if you new of Abner and what you thought.
I recognize the name, I think mostly because he worked for The New Yorker early in his career. The 8 CD set of every New Yorker issue up to the time of release was an incredible bargain at $60, despite its lunatic search function. And it still works with Windows 11 (unlike the Playboy and National Lampoon sets).
Doing a quick search I see he went from single panel cartoons to something closer to what we’d call today graphic novels. Interesting and unusual for the period.
Hi, everyone. After many months of unrelieved slogging I finally have a great big new addition to my website: “Our Next President?” - An epic-length look at the history of presidential campaign books by comedians.
Talk about forgotten. Eddie Cantor ran for President back in 1932 and put out a campaign book called Your Next President! Probably his grandchildren don’t remember. Gracie Allen ran on the Surprise Party ticket in 1940 and did a whistlestop train tour to thousands of cheering supporters. A book followed. W. C. Fields followed the path of least effort and released a book of his previously published essays in 1940, while his editor stuck on a bit of election fluff. Jimmy Durante - Jimmy Durante! - a television superstar in 1952, got a book of pictures of him mugging called The Candidate. Jackie Mason did exactly the same in 1964, My Son, the Candidate. Someone we silver-haired Dopers should remember is Pat Paulsen, whose character on the Smothers Brothers Show ran a campaign in 1968 that may have earned the most press of anyone. None of the previous comedians wrote their own books and neither did Paulsen. Showrunner Mason Williams with the help of Jinx Kragen wrote it for and about him. Famed comedian Yetta Bronstein is the only one who actually wrote her own book, The President I Almost Was, idiosyncratically released in the non-campaign year of 1966. She ran in 1964 and 1968, hampered only slightly by the fact that she didn’t exist. And yet she was a famed comedian whose name you probably wouldn’t recognize. It’s moments like these that I live for. And there’s much, much more.
With my standard reluctance to leave out anything that sounds like fun, the article is endless, fortunately broken up by endless images that I’m sure you haven’t seen before. You can probably finish it before the election. I hope you enjoy the trip. As always, if you notice any problems, typos, or even lack of proper italicizing, please, please let me know so that I can correct them.
Hi, I just discovered your forgotten humorists site and then tracked you to this site. You seem like the perfect person to ask: can you recommend some American humorists from the 1950s and 1960s? I just finished reading Peter DeVries’s “Without a Stitch in Time” and I’d love to find other writers like him! I’ve read all of Dawn Powell’s New York novels, and a fair amount of James Thurber, and am wondering who else wrote humor/satire about New York in that era. Thank you.
Oh, man. Whenever I’m asked a direct question like this my mind immediately goes blank. Let me think about it for a while.
In the meantime, this site is great for getting answers from multiple people. You might try starting a new thread to ask this question, where it would probably get a lot of attention.
I’ll do that, but I seriously doubt anyone will have the level of your expertise!