Mr. Dooley, the character created by Peter Finlay Dunne, is still quoted today because his observations on politics are as true and funny as they were in 1890s, like the immortal “th’ supreme coort follows th’ iliction returns.” But they are written in such a thick Irish dialect that a sentence takes five minutes to traverse. And almost all the names and events are no longer remembered. Art Buchward has the same problem and he wrote into the 2000s.
Dunne was followed by the first comic millionaire. His books went into dozens of printings. His pieces were syndicated in newspapers across the country. He made so much money that he went home to Indiana and built a mansion. Then he was rumored to have bought up all the neighboring land, in fact the entire county. The county was 400 sq. mi. Probably not true, but we’re talking money.
His shtick was writing modern “Fables” satirizing the morals and foibles of the day. He did enough for a dozen books before moving on to other stuff.
And he is so absolutely totally forgotten today that I’m going to put his name in spoilers and I’ll give a quatloo to anyone who doesn’t need to look.
I knew the name. I’m pretty sure that’s because I’ve seen it in crossword puzzles. If you want to be remembered, have a name that’s short and vowel-heavy.
ETA: I’ve tried several ways to number the items above as 1, 2, 5 but it won’t let me. I guess the algo “corrects” and puts the 3 back in. Very strange. The joke intended was if I’m too drunk to count…
The word “comedy” just meant that it had a happy ending. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t have what we call comedy; they just had a different word for it. Though of course there was a lot of overlap between “funny stories” and “stories with a happy ending”, which lead to the drift in meaning.
That may be technically correct (Wikipedia agrees with that definition), but I’ve read a LOT of Greek and Roman plays (and even tried my hand at translating parts of them), and I can’t think of a single example of a “comedy” that is merely a play with a happy ending. The plays have outrageous plots filled with wordplay and jokes, and sometimes outrageous slapstick.
I always thought the shift to “dark and bleak” was deliberate, Twain’s warning that an over-reliance on technology and progress presents dangers of their own. In the end, Hank is literally surrounded by death and defeated—by Merlin’s magic, no less! No extreme is reliable.
I don’t either although I appreciate him. I like the Marx Brothers somewhat and I do realize that it’s a different era.
The Three Stooges on the other hand has never been funny to me, even as a child or adolescent when seemingly all of the other boys loved it. Slapstick has never appealed to me.
I probably should have said “points” rather than “point.” Throughout it’s a send-up of the romanticized stories of chivalry Twain found so amusing. The novel is peopled by largely obtuse nobles, lording over a kingdom of oppressed, grimy near slaves (and some actual slaves). So, it’s also a political commentary on class, and in particular the “logic” the ruling class employs to assert this is just as it should be.
It also compares modern society’s technological advancements (and by extension, its pseudo-wisdom) to the backward Arthurian culture. On the surface, the modern Hank Morgan’s “reason” seems demonstrably superior, demolishing superstition and “magic” wherever he finds it. But Twain doesn’t stop there. This technology is not sufficient to create any kind of permanent change—it’s too rapid for a culture so primitive. More than that, its victories are pyrrhic.
Hank scoffs at the superstitious savages, and places all his faith in his modern reason, a choice that finds him in the end surrounded by death and defeated by Merlin. Place your complete faith in any one thing at your peril. I read where Twain called Hank “an imbecile,” and I read one critic who speculated that Hank’s last name and Morgan le Fay’s first was a juxtaposition that was not coincidental. Two sides of the same coin.
So, in summary, Twain as usual is a wonderful storyteller who simultaneously, almost without the reader realizing it, explores a number of interesting themes. The Bing Crosby flick does NOT do it justice.
This reminds me, for some reason, of a very humorous segment from Herman Melville. Not a man known for his comedy.
In Bartelby, the Scrivener, the boss of an office is way too accommodating and forgiving…and non-confrontational. He has one worker who is so hungover every day, he does nothing before lunch. The other worker gets drunk at lunch daily and is useless in the afternoon.
Between the two men, he one whole worker.
Over 100 years old and a pretty cute and funny situation.
One of my high school teachers always spent time each year riffing on Twain’s Cooper exegesis as a treat. I know I loved it.
There was a Silent Movie Theater near Melrose on Fairfax that I used to go with friends in high school. They showed a wide variety of things, but they always had a bunch of shorts. I roared at the Chaplin ones. He was much more anarchic in the shorts than in his feature length movies where he sometimes dived head first into the schmaltz. But my heart belonged to Keaton.
When John Wilkes Booth shot and killed Abraham Lincoln, he waited for the funniest line of the play, Our American Cousin, since the laughter would drown out the noise of the shot.
What was the line?
I believe that much of humor is timeless, but I think something is lost in translation over the centuries.
