Will Cuppy Tonight: "How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes"

by Ken

We haven't heard from our friend Will Cuppy in a while, and while I thought Thursday that we might dip once again into his most popular books, because it's subjects are human (biologically, at least), I think now that we will go back to his second book, How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes -- and go systematically through his pieces concerning species that are closest to our own, including the one that is our own, starting with the book's first part, "Memoirs of the Jukes Familly; or, Where We Come In."

For those coming new to Will Cuppy, the thing to remember about his zoological studies is that, funny as they may be, none of the facts are made up or even stretched. He researched his pieces fanatically, a point he had trouble communicating to The New Yorker's editors, who seemed to think he was just making stuff up. I don't doubt that anthropological research has advanced the state of the knowledge of homo sapiens' ancestors beyond the state of that knowledge in 1931, when this book was published, but Cuppy was giving his readers that state of knowledge.

We're going to start with a major part of Cuppy's preface.


FOR OUR FIRST INSTALLMENT FROM HOW TO TELL
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THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, JEAN SHEPHERD, and PERELMAN TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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