Just in time for the holidays: Your comprehensive-ish guide to "Thurber (et al.) Tonight" (the whole dang series)

Including Woody Allen, Robert Benchley, Bob and Ray, Will Cuppy, Wolcott Gibbs, Ring Lardner, S. J. Perelman, Jean Shepherd, and E. B. White Tonight


All I asked Santa for was a better picture of the great Will Cuppy; the one I've been using looks like it was taken clandestinely while he was in the Witness Protection program. However, given my lack of faith in the fat phony, I wasn't optimistic that he'd come through, so I went searching on my own once again, and once again my Google Images search for "Will Cuppy" yielded the swell pix of Will Rogers and Ring Lardner which somehow always turn up, and once again I had to decide, with heavy heart, that no, they wouldn't really fill the gap better than what we've got. But then the above image turned up, and I figured that since it purports to be part of a book cover, the chap portrayed therein must actually be our Will. I have to say, though, that this pic creeps the dickens out of me, and so I don't think I'll be popping it into the Will Cuppy slot below. I think I'm actually going to be trying to forget I ever saw it. Sheesh!

by Ken

You look around and see all those decked halls, then close your eyes and hear all that fa-la-la-la-la-ing, and almost instantly you know something's up, am I right? Or else you read Noah's post last night, "Profiles In Cowardice: The Electoral College," and noticed that it's also Part 1 of his annual, er, tribute to the outgoing year, this time out: "2016: America Off The Rails."

That's right, it's the Holiday Season!

Okay, okay, I know it's been going on since about Columbus Day, if not Labor Day, and tonight is already Christmas Eve, for Bill O'Reilly's sake! I believe in letting the damned thing sneak up on me, so sneakily that with any luck it's almost past before it announces its presence. In a week or so we'll be ushering in a new year, and then begins the Countdown to Inauguration Day. And then we're on to wishing for a minimum of four more good years for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

So in the holiday spirit, or at least what passes for it hereabouts, I'm looking to slip into the DWT schedule some of what Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the Car Talk guys, liked to bill as "encore presentations" of memorable shows, which they hastened to explain were really things they pulled more or less randomly out of a box of old tapes. Naturally I never believed they were chosen entirely at random -- after all, there had to be some reason why those particular tapes were in that particular box, right? 

And I'm not going to be choosing entirely randomly either. On the theory that along about now we could all use a few laughs, and also because it's one of the things i'm proudest of having done, I'm planning to dig into the "Thurber (et al.) Tonight" series I did here way back in some previous century.

Earlier this year I did perform a couple of resurrections from the series. There was a June post called "Having trouble getting things done? Learn from the master, the great Robert Benchley," which brought back a piece I think of just about every day, "How to Get Things Done." (Short version: "The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.") Then in August I felt the itch again, and again it was a Benchley piece I had to bring back, in a post called "Comedy Tonight: 'Why We Laugh -- or Do We?': Another 'Benchley Tonight' Resurrection."

And I didn't even get (back) to what may be my very favorite Benchley piece, "A Little Sermon on Success." (As noted in the comprehensive-ish listing below -- "comprehensive-ish" in that I can't help feeling that I've missed an instance or two here or there -- you can find it here.) Not to mention the sublime "My Five- (or Maybe Six-) Year Plan." And . . . .

And no Thurber encore presentations at all! Yikes!

So I've cooked up this scheme for the holiday season (and perhaps the January slump season as well) to find post slots where I can slip in some especially cherished posts from these revered masters, and maybe some suggested "must reads" from among the stuff of theirs that was previously presented, at least until Howie cries out, "Please stop already!"

But, first things first (not my usual practice, as readers may be aware), I thought we would start with the comprehensive-ish listing itself. This is essentially unchanged from the version to which I have been providing a link since time immemorial. The one change I contemplated was to be able to pop in, finally, a better picture of Will Cuppy, but as noted in the photo caption above, that project came to a creepier-than-dead end.

And so, without further ado, excepting one tiny click-through --


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Having trouble getting things done? Learn from the master, the great Robert Benchley

Harking back to our comedy nights with Benchley plus James Thurber, Woody Allen, Bob and Ray, Will Cuppy, Wolcott Gibbs, Ring Lardner, S. J. Perelman, Jean Shepherd, and E. B. White


"The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one. I have based it very deliberately on a well-known psychological principle and have refined it so that it is now almost too refined. I shall have to begin coarsening it up again pretty soon.

"The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment."

-- Robert Benchley, in "How to Get Things Done"

by Ken

Today, a long-delayed labor of love: the resurrection of a series that was itself a prolonged labor of love, running here in the late-night slot -- for which, in fact, the late-night slot was invented -- over a long and fondly remembered period. It started with Thurber but then went on to include all the names you see above. And in resurrecting it, the name that has crowded to the forefront of my consciousness is that of the great Robert Benchley, specifically in the form of the piece we're about to revisit: "How to Get Things Done," which was first published in the Chicago Tribune in 1930 and first appeared here as a "Benchley Tonight" post in January 2011.

Lately I've been trying to get bits of my life in order, or at any rate a bit more in order, and have had frequent occasion to talk about this as well, frequently with other people trying to do the same thing with their lives. As a result, I've had frequent occasion to try to synopsize this all-but-definitive treatise on how really and truly to get things done -- the secret, as our Bob puts it, to "how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated." By the way, I tried unsuccessfully to track down a picture of our Bob "riding to hounds" or "going to fancy-dress balls disguised as Louis XIV"; there don't seem to have been photographers present on these occasions.

So there was no question in my mind that of all the thousands of sublime pieces that appeared in this series, "How to Get Things Done" is the one for which present-day readers are likely to have the most urgent need. The master list for the series, by the way, can still be found here.



Now let's get down to business -- or, rather, business Benchley-style.

How to Get Things Done

by Robert Benchley

A GREAT MANY PEOPLE have come up to me and asked me how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. My answer is "Don't you wish you knew?" and a pretty good answer it is, too, when you consider that nine times out of ten I didn't hear the original question.

But the fact remains that hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country are wondering how I have time to do all my painting, engineering, writing and philanthropic work when, according to the rotogravure sections and society notes I spend all my time riding to hounds, going to fancy-dress balls disguised as Louis XIV or spelling out GREETINGS TO CALIFORNIA in formation with three thousand Los Angeles school children. "All work and all play," they say.

The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one. I have based it very deliberately on a well-known psychological principle and have refined it so that it is now almost too refined. I shall have to begin coarsening it up again pretty soon.

The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.

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I wish I could at least get a post out of my miscommunications with the Customer Care folks at The New Yorker

This cartoon (click on it to enlarge) from the current New Yorker doesn't strike me as all that funny, but it does represent a sort of royal take on the idea of making lemonade when life gives you lemons, which is a subject of the post that follows.

by Ken

I like that old saying about how when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade. I don't mean to say that it has often served as practical advice for me. It's just that I like lemonade (provided it's not too sweet), and thinking of this old saying gets me to thinking about lemonade (i'm extremely suggestible where food and drink are concerned) -- not figurative lemonade but the real kind, and I find it, even in its imaginary state, pleasurable to think about. It has been known more than once to get my mind off those figurative lemons I was thinking about, if only for a few seconds. Those few seconds are better than nothing.

In this spirit I thought there might be some public service renderable in my ongoing e-correspondence with the folks at the clearly misnamed Customer Care portal of newyorker.com, in a seemingly futile effort to get someone to grasp that, despite being a subscriber of, let's just say, many years, I have been unable to sign on for subscriber access the website since the erection of the new paywall following the summer-plus of free-for-all access.

I was unable to sign on for the most alarmingly blatant of reasons: On two different Macs, in both the Safari and Firefox browsers, when I clicked on either the supposed "Sign in" or "Link your subscription" links, nothing happened except that I lost the vertical scrollbar at the side of the window. As a result, the exhortations I eventually got from Customer Care to sign in using my same old e-mail-address log-in had a presumably unintended "rubbing it in" quality. If you don't have access to prompts asking for your log-in ID and password, being told what to use as your log-in ID takes on a tone of taunting. This effect was only heightened with the friendly encouragement at the end of each, er, communication:

If we can be of further assistance, please let us know. To ensure your future concerns are handled in a timely fashion, please include all previous e-mail correspondence.

Thank you for contacting The New Yorker.

Further assistance?

In the course of this unfruitful correspondence, I discovered that via Google Chrome, which I have installed on only one of the two computers in question (and can't easily get on the other), I actually could sign in. But I don't like Google Chrome, and use it on the one computer that has it only when I run into problems with both Safari and Firefox. (Hey, it happens.) And as I said, I don't and really can't have it on the other computer I regularly use. So I had mixed feelings when the last-received, er, response, included the following:

Please accept our sincere apologies.

We are constantly working to improve our digital products. Please know that we are currently working on this problem and we will be releasing a fix soon for the problem experienced with Safari.

In the mean time, we recommend that you use Google Chrome for access.

If we can be of further assistance, please let us know. To ensure your future concerns are handled in a timely fashion, please include all previous e-mail correspondence.

On the plus side, this actually did relate to my complaint, and if I had within me a spark of human gratitude, I should be over the moon. Also on the plus side, there was apparent acknowledgment of "the problem experienced with Safari," which apparently, it seems, was known! (Wasn't that, or wouldn't it have been, a key part of the response to my original complaint?)

On the minus side, well, perhaps you can figure that out for yourself.


HAVE WE READ JAMES THURBER'S 
"FILE AND FORGET" RECENTLY?

As I thought, in the spirit of making lemonade from these lemons, that there might be a post to be gotten out of all this which might be of some earthly use. No such luck.

Then I thought maybe I could get some sort of moderately humorous post from the epistolary back-and-forth, in the manner of two immortal James Thurber tales-of-futility, "File and Forget," about the author's attempt to deal with a host of miscommunications with his publisher, and "Joyeux Noël, Mr. Durning," about his protracted efforts to extract an impounded gift bottle of wine from U.S. Customs. That's not going to happen either, but I thought at least I could provide links to my "Thurber Tonight" prsentations of those pieces: "File and Forget" and "Joyeux Noël, Mr. Durning."

By the way, I have now discovered that when I click on the "Sign in" link in Safari and Firefox, something does happen. I get a whole page listing apparent places to go, and at the bottom, yes, actual prompts for user ID and password, which I can actually fill in! Of course, when I click on the "sign in" button, nothing happens, at least as far as I can tell.

Oh well.

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Serious funnyfolks: Bob Mankoff's update of "I say it's spinach," Lee Lorenz on banksters, and Chuck Lorre on, well, life

"I say it's government-mandated broccoli, and I say the hell with it."

by Ken

How audacious of our friend Bob Mankoff, not only the The New Yorker's cartoon editor but one of the magazine's elite cartoonists, to offer the above cartoon this week! What's audacious is that, while it's pretty funny in its own right, it really counts on the reader recognizing it as an hommage to one of the magazine's most famous cartoons, drawn by Carl Rose in 1928 with the caption provided by E. B. White.

"It's broccoli, dear."
"I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it."

I should add that it was a common cartoon practice in those days, to have captions provided by gag-writers to fit drawings -- or vice versa. Not that I mean to reduce E. B. White to the status of a "gag-writer," but in this case that's what his function was.

If the Rose-White cartoon looks familiar, well, there are lots of places you could have seen it, but one of them is one of the posts I did after attending the Thurber tribute ringmastered by Thurber aficionado extraordinaire Keith Olbermann last June at New York's 92nd Street Y: "Bob Mankoff pays tribute to James Thurber's decisive role 'in shaping the modern New Yorker cartoon.'" Bob had been one of the panelists at the 92nd Street Y shindig, and he reconfigured the presentation he gave that night into one of his wonderful weekly newsletters-blogposts, "James Thurber's Giant Swoop."

No, it's not a Thurber cartoon. Bob was using it as an illustration of the state of cartooning that Thurber broke through. "In the early twentieth century," he explained, "cartoons were illustrated anecdotes," and "the same style was found in the early days of The New Yorker. This was all illustrated with select examples, on up to "this refreshingly less stilted and beloved cartoon from 1928," which he said "comes from the same template."

For Bob's description of how Thurber broke the cartoon mold, and how subsequent cartoonists have taken advantage of it, check out either Bob's own blog presentation or my hashed version of it. My immediate point is that he has established himself pretty well as custodian of New Yorker cartoon history, to the point of now offering this charming takeoff on the Rose-White cartoon. (Note, by the way, that he has eliminated the anecdotal "dialogue" format of the original.)


BY COINCIDENCE OR NOT, THIS WEEK'S NEW YORKER
ALSO INCLUDES A POLITICAL-THEMED CARTOON BY LEE LORENZ

Lee was Bob's predecessor as cartoon editor of The New Yorker (from 1993 to 1997; for 20 years before that he was the magazine's art editor).


Lee Lorenz's name comes up frequently in Bob's blogposts, not least in the series (which I wrote about most recently in a post called "You'll never guess who drew tonight's first cartoon -- but you can't possibly miss the second") he's been doing on the first New Yorker cartoons of the now-veteran group of cartoonists Lee brought into the fold in the '70s, including Jack Ziegler, Mick Stevens, Michael Maslin, and Roz Chast. (Bob himself is part of that group, and had already written about the first cartoon of his that Lee bought.)

By the way, I stumbled across a terrific, wide-ranging interview with Lee Lorenz, done by Richard Gehr for The Comics Journal last August. In case you were wondering, Lee (who turns 80 this October) is still very much with us and still working. He talks freely about his non-cartooning interests (he's both a Pratt Institute-trained artist and a rabid jazz enthusiast and practitioner, on the trumpet), and fills in all kinds of background about the inner workings, editorial and political, of The New Yorker over the decades since he first glimpsed those insides, in the 1950s. He reveals, for one thing, that when he became art editor in 1973, the job had first been offered to New Yorker insider Roger Angell (the son of longtime fiction editor Katharine S. White and stepson of E. B. White).

[E]vidently they couldn’t come to terms on the money. The New Yorker was making all kinds of money, but they were very cheap. In fact, when they offered me the job, the lawyer who was supposed to negotiate the contract suggested that whatever I made as a cartoonist be deducted from my salary as an editor!

Richard Gehr offers this observation about Lee's cartooning style:

hese days, Lorenz’s brush strokes provide rich visual contrast to the pen-preferring cartoonists who dominate The New Yorker. Like the abstract expressionists he studied at Carnegie and Pratt, Lee’s lines radiate a lively in-the-moment quality. He often captures characters in motion who just happen to make you laugh out loud. And there’s an improvised aspect to his work that echoes both his own abstract-expressionist paintings and the jazz he began devoting himself to as a teenager.

If you're at all curious about any of these subjects, I can heartily recommend the Gehr interview.


SPEAKING OF PROFESSIONAL FUNNYFOLKS WHO TAKE
ON WEIGHTY LIFE SUBJECTS, HERE'S CHUCK LORRE

If you watch any of the sitcoms that Chuck produces (the current list is Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, and Mike and Molly), you know that at the end of each episode a vanity card is flashed, featuring whatever happens to be on his mind, subject to occasional network censorship. As a DWT reader once pointed out to me, the texts of the vanity cards are also archived online, at www.chucklorre.com.

I really loved the card from last night's new Big Bang Theory episode, and even though the power center he's obsessing over here is "the television business," what he writes seems to me eerily applicable to the broccoli-bullying Supreme Court justices, and predatory bankster elites, and really most everything we write about of a political nature here at DWT. I should warn you that Chuck was clearly not in a sunny frame of mind when he wrote this.

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #383

For me, the epiphany came in my second season on Roseanne. At thirty-nine years old I finally woke up to the fact that the principles I was taught as a child, like fairness and justice, have no place in the world of power and money. The rules of the sandbox, strictly enforced by a wise and compassionate adult, are laughable when the sandbox is the television business and there are Mercedes and Bentleys parked alongside it. What's odd is that twenty years later, despite my belated awakening to the reality of amorality, that old schoolyard programming continues to insist on its rightness. Ideas like "play nice," "share your toys," "no name-calling," "take turns" and "misbehaving gets punished" still resonate inside me as if they were some sort of fundamental truths. Of course, I now know that they are not. At best, they're ideals. Lofty goals to aspire to. The truisms of the real world are more along the lines of, "my ball, my bat, my rules" and "money talks, bull$#*! walks." Which brings me to our impending presidential election. A classic showdown between the lessons we all learned as children and, well... reality. Further complicating the situation is our collective, unconscious desire to be supervised by that wise and compassionate adult. But there is no such adult. The truth is, we are alone in the sandbox. The game we play, seemingly forever, is called "Ideals vs. Money and Bats." For what it's worth, I'm betting on the latter, but there's a little boy in me who insists on voting for the former.

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Comedy Tonight: A "final installment" for Bob Mankoff's "perfect cartoon" quest

One of the sample Michael Maslin cartoons Bob Mankoff offers:

"Once again I find myself in the rather awkward
position of having to ask one of you for a biscuit."

by Ken

We've been following New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's quest for "the perfect cartoon," first when he announced it, the when he followed up with a defense of his 1946 Chon Day pick -- the cartoon that depicted a clearly long-suffering shoe salesman dealing with an even more clearly difficult customer -- against what I considered an ass-ignorant accusation of sexism. So I've been waiting for an opportunity to bring readers who haven't seen Bob's latest newsletter-blogpost up to date on the subject, "Michael Maslin's Perfect Cartoon" (December 28).

Bob thought that "the perfect end-of-year post would be a final installment about the perfect cartoon," and for that he turned to fellow New Yorker cartoonist (more than 700 cartoons published since the late '70s!) Michael Maslin, who "chronicles everything involving New Yorker cartoons and cartoonists at Ink Spill," where Bob says he often goes himself "to find out what I'm doing."

"When I asked Michael to pick his perfect cartoon," Bob writes, "I was pretty sure who the cartoonist would be." There's never been any doubt about "the influence of his idol, James Thurber." He offers several samples, including the one I've put at the top of this post. I really like this one too:

"Things were done very differently on the farm
when I was your age, Kenny."

Sure enough, Michael is torn between two Thurber cartoons, one perhaps the most famous of them all, the "seal in the attic" drawing, which we've talked about a number of times. (We've had both Thurber's explanation of the mistake by which the drawing came into being and also E. B. White famous account of how he took it upon himself to ink in this particular drawing, from among the pile-up that littered the floor of the tiny New Yorker office they shared at the time, and send it to the magazine's art meeting.)

"All right, have it your way -- you heard a seal bark."

Michael's other choice is this familiar but much less known Thurber cartoon:

"What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?"

The reason I bring this all up is because I really love Michael's explanation-commentary on the two cartoons. I don't know that it's necessary to be able analyze a drawing this way in order to produce high-quality cartoons, but I'm fascinated by the way he looks at these cartoons, and the insight he's able to offer:

"What Have You Done with Dr. Millmoss?" changed my life. It was the first Thurber drawing I ever saw and the first New Yorker cartoon that ever meant anything to me. It would be easy to say the seal drawing -- Thurber's most popular -- is perfection itself, and in so many ways it is, but I'd go with Millmoss.

The woman is classic Thurber, but look closely at the hippopotamus: at its eye and its eyebrow, at the curve of the mouth. What is that expression? There's no answer. And so you look again, and again. I've been looking for thirty-five years.

The caption is short and uncomplicated, and Thurber didn't try for a "funny" name for the doctor. And other than his name, all that's left of Dr. Millmoss is the pipe, the shoe, and the hat. Try covering them up with your finger. The drawing works O.K. without them, but with them it's a masterpiece.

To me, that's really something!


HERE ONCE AGAIN IS THE 1946 CHON DAY CARTOON
THAT BOB MANKOFF PICKED AS HIS "PERFECT CARTOON"

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Thurber Tonight: "Sex ex Machina" from "Let Your Mind Alone!"

Happily mated rabbit terrified by motor-car

"Still other [writers] attribute the whole menace of the machine to sex, and so confuse the average reader that he cannot always be certain whether he has been knocked down by an automobile or is merely in love."

-- from "Sex ex Machina," the last
of our Let Your Mind Alone! offerings

by Ken

As noted previously, this as far as we're going with the Let Your Mind Alone! series (two installments away from the end). I still haven't figured out what we'll do next week for our final week of late-night more-or-less-comic writing. (We might fill in some of the missed episodes of Thurber's My Life and Hard Times . . . .)

I still haven't turned up my lovely replacement copy for my previous lost copy of Thurber and E. B. White's Is Sex Necessary? (for that matter, I still haven't turned up my at-large copy of the Library of America Thurber volume; it's just a matter of time . . . probably), in order to present White's version of how he engineered the use of Thurber drawings -- at a time when practically nobody outside the small office they shared at The New Yorker, which was apparently littered with the damned things, had seen a Thurber drawing -- as illustrations for the book, to the consternation of their editor at Harper's, who assumed, when first confronted with the drawings (with Thurber's dashed-off pencil strokes laboriously and painstakingly inked over by White), that they must be rough sketches for artwork the authors wished to have produced.

There's a lot of other stuff I never got to, but there's one project in particular I've had in mind for ages: to see whether there isn't a manageably extractable chunk from Thurber's memoir The Years With Ross concerning The New Yorker's publication of Wolcott Gibbs's famous November 1936 profile of Time, Inc. editor-magnate Henry Luce (there were all manner of permutations and complications and ramifications), which would be presented in tandem with the piece itself, "TIME . . . FORTUNE . . . LIFE . . . LUCE." That still feels like a lot of work, though. (Why do you think I never did it?)

In the meantime . . . .

YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT! FOR
"SEX EX MACHINA," CLICK HERE

Our coverage of the Let Your Mind Alone! series:

1. "Pythagoras and the Ladder"
2. "Destructive Forces in Life"
3. "The Case for the Daydreamer"
4, "A Dozen Disciplines"
5. "How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work"
6. "Anodynes for Anxieties"
7. "The Conscious vs. The Unconscious"
8. "Sex ex Machina" (tonight)

ONE LAST TIME, ANY REQUESTS?

As noted above, I still don't have this last week planned, so if you have any thoughts, there's at least a chance I may be able to do them, or something like them, or something distantly related to them. As I said the other day, it might be worth a shot.


THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: "The Conscious vs. The Unconscious" from "Let Your Mind Alone!"

Psychiatrist about to phone his wife

"Of course, I believe that this particular psychiatrist [trying unsuccessfully to telephone his wife to say he could not be home for dinner] dialled the three wrong numbers on purpose. In the case of all husbands, both neurotic and normal, this is known as sparring for time and has no real psychological significance."

-- from "The Conscious vs. The Unconscious"

by Ken

After going back and picking up the opening piece of the Let Your Mind Alone! series, we've now filled in the gap between the two pieces I plucked out previously -- No. 2, "Destructive Forces in Life," and No. 6, "Anodynes for Anxieties." Now we're ready to move on, with Nos. 7 and 8, "The Conscious vs. The Unconscious" tonight and "Sex ex Machina" tomorrow night.

For the remaining pieces in the series, Nos. 9 and 10, "Sample Intelligence Test" and "Miscellaneous Mentation," you'll have to track down a copy of Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces -- they're not that hard to find (Amazon has inexpensive listings for a number of editions) -- or the Library of America Thurber anthology edited by Garrison Keillor, which includes all ten of the Let Your Mind Alone! pieces but only eight of the 28 other "more or less inspirational pieces," not including my much-loved "No Standing Room Only." (Keillor!) Actually, though, among those 28 pieces there aren't many that I love.

CORRECTION: Which reminds me: The other piece that I've been listing in the index since February as being in Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces, "The Letters of James Thurber," is in fact included in My World -- And Welcome to It. Which is vaguely ironic, because when I presented "The Letters of James Thurber," I wrote, "I always have to rummage around the Thurber books to find 'The Letters of James Thurber,' a piece of which I'm extremely fond." I must have known this at the time; I never did identify the book in the text. But I proceeded to dig up a photo of the wrong book, and then formalized the confusion in the index listing. (I've corrected the index.)


FOR A THURBER-CONDUCTED TOUR THROUGH
THE CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS, CLICK HERE

Our previous coverage of the Let Your Mind Alone! series:

1. "Pythagoras and the Ladder"
2. "Destructive Forces in Life"
3. "The Case for the Daydreamer"
4, "A Dozen Disciplines"
5. "How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work"
6. "Anodynes for Anxieties"

Tomorrow night: Our (though not the book's) concluding installment, No. 8, "Sex ex Machina" -- how can we resist a treatise with the word "sex" in the title?

ANY REQUESTS?

I'm thinking we'll let this thing run one more week, and I don't have anything planned yet. (I have to try to think of pieces I've been meaning to include, or have forgotten to mean to include, all this time. In the cases of the pieces I know about, there are reasons why I haven't gotten to them, which I'd be surprised if I can solve inside a week.) I'm not saying I can satisfy your requests, but hey, it might be worth a shot.


THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: "How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work" from "Let Your Mind Alone!"

B. J. ("Two-Gun") Winfall, of New York City

[Yes, you can click on the drawing to enlarge it.]

"The bartender took his time slamming glasses and a bottle down on the bar. B.J. filled a glass, tossed it off, turned heavily, and faced the roomful of men. 'I'm Two-Gun Winfall from New York City!' he shouted. 'Anybody want anything?'"

-- from tonight's installment of Let Your Mind Alone!,
"How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work"

by Ken

When I first read the Let Your Mind Alone! pieces they were already two or three decades old (though more time has of course elapsed since then), and already came from a world that was in many respects different. That didn't bother me. In fact, it probably enhanced the experience: seeing how that world was different and yet in so many important ways hardly different at all from ours. That still seems to me the case, at this significantly larger remove in time.

I find now, just as I did back then, that Thurber's inquiry into this outpouring of books in what we might now call the "mental self-help" genre had aged hardly at all. Oh, each wave of these things has its own "age" and some of its own jargon, but the character and crappiness of the advice changes remarkably little. For all that the infamous Dorothea Brande and David Seabury (whose, er, "masterpiece," The Art of Selfishness, was published in 1937, the year after How to Worry Successfully) are creatures of their time, they (or their close kin) are just as much creatures of ours. Could the local TV talk shows survive without them?

Even the seemingly "topical" references sometimes defy their age. Al Capone, for example, whose spirit overhangs Thurber's tale of B. J. "Two-Gun" Winfall's invasion of Chicago. When I first read these pieces, everyone I knew had grown up with Capone thanks to The Untouchables. (That would be the TV series, of course, with Robert Stack as he indefatigable and incorruptible Eliot Ness.) Yet Capone, it seems to me, has never lost his iconic status, through Geraldo and the vault on up to Boardwalk Empire.


FOR THE FULL STORY OF "TWO-GUN" WINFALL'S
BRASH BRUSH WITH MORTALITY, CLICK HERE

Our previous coverage of the Let Your Mind Alone! series:

1. "Pythagoras and the Ladder"
2. "Destructive Forces in Life"
3. "The Case for the Daydreamer"
4, "A Dozen Disciplines"
6. "Anodynes for Anxieties"

Tomorrow night: No. 7, "The Conscious vs. the Unconscious" -- introducing Dr. Louis E. Bisch's magnum opus, Be Glad You're Neurotic

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Maybe we'd all be better off if this Thurber fellow did bring the etchings down

by Ken

I don't know how many times I've looked at this classic Thurber drawing over the years, and of course I've always laughed, but it's never produced me quite the effect -- a hearty guffaw, yes, but also some sort of jolt -- it did today when I saw it again in this week's edition of "From the Desk of Bob Mankoff," the New Yorker cartoon editor's newsletter-slash-blogpost, which I've described here as the most welcome offering I can look forward to finding regularly in my e-mailbox. (We've talked about it a bunch of times, most recently in connection with Bob's promotion of prima cartoonist Roz Chast's invention of Stranger's Day.)

TO SIGN UP FOR BOB MANKOFF'S NEWSLETTER

Remember, it's free. Just go the the magazine's website and look on the right side, way down, for a box with tabs for "NEWSLETTERS," "PODCASTS," and "FEEDS." I don't know from podcasts or feeds, but under the "NEWSLETTERS" tab you'll find checkboxes for "This Week" and "Cartoons" ("A weekly note from the New Yorker's cartoon editor"). Just check it and click on "SUBMIT.")

In blog form Bob's musings this week carry the title "My Sexual Revolution." (The newsletter version has no title.) He begins:

So Ariel Levy tells me that my generation did not invent sex. Bummer! Now I have to cross that off my C.V. It turns out there were previous sexual revolutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If you say so, Ari, but ours had better music.

Still, I always thought the term “sexual revolution” was minted in the sixties, until I came across the 1929 book “Is Sex Necessary?,” by James Thurber and E. B. White. From chapter four, “The Sexual Revolution: Being a Rather Complete Survey of the Entire Sexual Scene”:

The sexual revolution began with Man’s discovery that he was not attractive to Woman, as such. The lion had his mane, the peacock his gorgeous plumage, but Man found himself in a three-button sack suit.


His masculine appearance not only failed to excite Woman, but in many cases it only served to bore her. The result was that Man found it necessary to develop attractive personal traits to offset his dull appearance. He learned to say funny things. . .

(The Ariel levy link is not, as you might guess, to a memo Levy sent to him on the subject, but to a "Books" piece of Ms. Levy's in the September 19 issue called "Novelty Acts," blurbed "The sexual revolutions before the sexual revolution" and starring the master of the orgone box, Wilhelm Reich.)

And then Bob pops in a couple of examples of "funny things about the new sexual freedom, and how it befuddled the Thurberesque male" which Thurber went on to draw, starting with the old favorite we've already seen at the top of this post, and proceeding to this even more cheerful one:


About the etchings drawing, I realize that at this point in time I have very little idea what anybody knows and so entertain the possibility that readers under a certain age may not even recognize the "etchings" gag -- a standard line once comically attributed to would-be roués who attempted to lure innocent young females up to their hives by asking, "Would you like to come up and see my etchings?" (I think all the versions I ever heard involved coming "up," and so presumed either an apartment or a hotel room. I just don't think the gag would translate to a colonial or ranch-style house.)

I don't know what it is about the Thurber etchings cartoon that so tickled and tugged at me today -- something about the poor fellow's utter unawareness of his cluelessness? But I do know where Bob's musings on sexual revolutions past sent me: straight back to the 12th grade at James Madison High School, where as Howie and I have both had frequent occasion to note we jointly served time way back when.

There wasn't much that thrilled me about that education, but there was certainly a smattering of teachers who changed me forever. Howie and I have both written about our 9th-grade English teacher, Mr. Fulmer, the man who pointed out regularly, "In a thousand years we'll all be dead, and all that will matter is our record of truth and beauty," and who never let any of us use the verb "think" when it referred just to stuff dribbling out of our mouths as opposed to being produce by the actual thought process. (Looking back, I find a surprisingly timely 2009 post I was quite fond of called "Do folks like Texas Gov. Rick Perry keep their brains turned off because they're afraid the battery will run down?") But I don't think I've written about my 12th-grade English teacher, Miss Tannenbaum, another great teacher, who in her rather different way was equally unforgiving of teenage bullshit.

And one subject that inevitably came up a whole lot in a class of 12th graders was sex. It was left to Miss Tannenbaum our colossal if hardly original misimpression that we had invented sex. It's a misimpression common (I think) to every generation, going back a lot farther than Dr. Reich. I guess it's the power of sexual impulses that causes most everyone who's just experienced them to imagine that we must surely be the first -- or else the world would be an entirely different place from what it is. On the contrary, I suspect, the world is the way it is precisely because every generation has made this same discovery, and hardly anybody since then has had much clue what to do about it.

Suddenly today I guess I'm thinking that our Etchings Guy may, in his laughable befuddlement, be if not smarter then at least more sensible than the rest of us. Maybe we should just have him bring the damned etchings down.

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Thurber Tonight: "A Dozen Disciplines" from "Let Your Mind Alone!"

No, Thurber didn't make the book up.

"At forty-two, I have spent a great many hours thinking about all sorts of subjects, and there is not one of them that I want to go back to for a whole solid hour. I can pretty well cover as much of any subject as I want to in fifteen minutes. Sometimes in six."

-- from tonight's installment of Let Your
Mind Alone!, "A Dozen Disciplines"

by Ken

We've been filling in pieces from Thurber's 1936-37 series Let Your Mind Alone!, as gathered -- with a bunch of other pieces that hadn't yet appeared in book form -- in the book Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces. Tonight's piece, "A Dozen Disciplines," doesn't seem to have appeared in The New Yorker at all. At least I can't find any trace of it, and the magazine sequence goes from "III. The Case for the Daydreamer" (our No. 3) to "IV. How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work" (our No. 5), with the other pieces proceeding in sequence up to "IX. Miscellaneous Mentation" (our No. 10).

Anyone who has already been inspired by the inspirational writing of Mrs. Dorothea Brande, known to Thurber as "the Wake-Up-and-Live! woman," will find himself richly rewarded in "A Dozen Disciplines."


FOR THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE
WAKE-UP-AND-LIVE! WOMAN, CLICK HERE

Our previous coverage of the Let Your Mind Alone! series:

1. "Pythagoras and the Ladder"
2. "Destructive Forces in Life"
3. "The Case for the Daydreamer"
6. "Anodynes for Anxieties"

Tomorrow night: No. 5, "How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work"

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: "The Case for the Daydreamer" from "Let Your Mind Alone!"

"In fifteen minutes the average child whose parents are at a party can make enough flat statements of fact about one's personal appearance and ask enough pointed questions about one's private life to send one away feeling that there is little, if any, use in going on with anything at all, let alone a trip to Italy."

-- from tonight's installment of Let Your Mind Alone!,
"The Case for the Daydreamer"

by Ken

After last night's return to Thurber's sublime 1936-37 series Let Your Mind Alone! (later gathered in one of my favorite Thurber volumes, Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces) with the opening piece, "Pythagoras and the Ladder," I thought we'd just continue right along. We've already done No. 2, "Destructive Forces in Life," so tonight let's proceed with No. 3, "The Case for the Daydreamer."


FOR "THE CASE FOR THE DAYDREAMER," CLICK HERE

Our previous coverage of the Let Your Mind Alone! series:

1. "Pythagoras and the Ladder"
2. "Destructive Forces in Life"
6. "Anodynes for Anxieties"

Tomorrow night: No. 4, "A Dozen Disciplines"

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: "Pythagoras and the Ladder" from "Let Your Mind Alone!"

"Happy living, [Professor Pitkin] confidently asserted, could be attained by at least six or seven people out of every ten, but he figured that not more than one person in a thousand was actually attaining it."

-- from "Pythagoras and the Ladder,"
the first piece in the "Let Your Mind Alone!" series

by Ken

In this last week I think we'll try to fill some gaps and tie up some loose ends. For example, in Let Your Mind Alone! and other more or less inspirational pieces, from the "Let Your Mind Alone!" series I plucked out two pieces I especially love, "Destructive Forces in Life" (remember that infamous joker Burt Scursey?) and "Anodines for Anxiety." I regret having skipped over the first piece, "Pythagoras and the Ladder," in which Thurber explained the premise of the series. So tonight let's plug that gap.


FOR "PYTHAGORAS AND THE LADDER," CLICK HERE

Our previous coverage of the "Let Your Mind Alone!" series:

2. "Destructive Forces in Life"
6. "Anodynes for Anxieties"

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "The Curb in the Sky"

AN ANTHOLOGIST CAN'T PLEASE EVERYONE, BUT --: As you can see from this June post, I wasn't pleased to discover that Garrison Keillor, editor of the Library of America Thurber volume, had omitted "The Curb in the Sky" (along with the whole of "The Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Polite English Usage"). -- Ken

Again,* from "The War Between Men and Women"
(and again, you can click on it to enlarge it)

[*The previous night's post, noted below, which featured "The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery," had also come with a drawing from "The War Between Men and Women." -- Ed.]

"When Dorothy grew up she became quite pretty and so even more of a menace. Gentlemen became attracted to her and then attached to her. Emotionally she stirred them, but mentally she soon began to wear them down."

-- from "The Curb in the Sky"

by Ken

Tuesday night I described "The Curb in the Sky" as "seriously amusing but also strikingly, ineffably poignant." As compared with last night's "The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery," another tale of a, shall we say, "unintact" marriage, this one falls on the other side of the invisible line that, as I put it, "once you've stepped over, you've overstepped."

I noticed in Keith Olbermann's "Fridays with Thurber" reading of "The Greatest Man in the World" that he announced at the outset that he was reading as always from the Library of America edition of Thurber Writings and Drawings edited by Garrison Keillor. I guess it's a useful book, with so much swell stuff included, but one of the first things I discovered when I finally acquired a copy a year or two ago was the omission of what I consider one of the most essential Thurber texts, "The Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage" (from The Owl in the Attic).

Now, looking at the online contents listing for the LoA volume (somehow or other I quickly managed to misplace my copy), I'm shocked, shocked, to discover that "The Curb in the Sky" is omitted! Now I love Garrison Keillor immoderately (didn't I just quote him at length the other night?), but jeepers, to not include "The Curb in the Sky"? What the dickens was he using for brains?


DON'T LISTEN TO THAT DOPE KEILLOR! TO
READ "THE CURB IN THE SKY," CLICK HERE


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, and JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "No Standing Room Only" -- with a note on the early career of Vincent Price

THIS FEBRUARY "THURBER TONIGHT"
POST WAS ONE OF MY FAVORITES --

Not just for the piece itself, though I really love "No Standing Room Only." (Thurber himself records that he "brooded about this affair for quite a few days and nights," which was probably never a good thing for people in the potential line of fire when the brooding exploded.) But for "value added," I think DWT readers really got their money's worth here. Unless folks no longer know or care who Helen Hayes and Vincent Price were, which I realize is entirely possible. -- Ken


Ventures Thurber: "I somehow have the idea that Harry Essex, the company manager, didn't really understand what Miss Hayes said." (In this Bernard Hoffman photo for Life magazine, the 37-year-old Helen Hayes works on her makeup during a costume change for a March 1938 tour performance of Victoria Regina.)

"Just how many bewildered people were turned away in all on this sentimental occasion, I don't know, but I'm glad I wasn't the box-office man."

-- James Thurber, in "No Standing Room Only"

by Ken

"No Standing Room Only" appeared originally in The New Yorker of March 20, 1937, and in book form later that year in Let Your Mind Alone!; and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces.

A 1937 New Yorker reader would surely have known that playwright Charles MacArthur (1895-1956) -- co-author with his frequent writing partner Ben Hecht of the raucous Chicago-newspaper comedy The Front Page -- was the husband of Helen Hayes (1900-1993). (Their son James, who died just this past October, became the busy actor best known now for playing the busily-booking-'em Danno in the original Hawaii Five-O, and their son John was the "John D. MacArthur" of the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation that gives the genius awards.)


WHAT EXACTLY WAS MISS HAYES'S UNUSUAL IDEA FOR
CELEBRATING THE PLAY'S ANNIVERSARY? CLICK HERE


THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"

BEFORE WE FIRST MET WALTER MITTY, IN DECEMBER --

I wrote a note about Thurber's considerable displeasure with the making of the film version, in connection with the obvious connection between the fable "The Unicorn in the Garden" and his other most memorable piece of short fiction, the altogether dazzling "The Catbird Seat" -- and I included a link to the complete text of "The Catbird Seat" online.


The opening of MGM's 1947 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, with Danny Kaye as the intrepid fantasist and Fay Bainter as Mrs. Mitty. Thurber, who was not a fan of the film, wrote in a 1949 letter: "The trouble with the Goldwyn picture was that you could see no difference between Walter's dreams and his accomplishments."

by Ken

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," which first appeared in The New Yorker of March 18, 1939 (and was subsequently collected in My World and Welcome to It and The Thurber Carnival), isn't anywhere near my favorite Thurber piece, but of course I love it. How could anyone not? I'm not sure Thurber ever reached more resolutely into readers' deep consciousness, nor have many other writers traveled there as confidently or fearlessly.

I've mentioned how disillusioned Thurber became during the writing of the screenplay for the film, which wound up being primarily a vehicle for Danny Kaye's broadest brand of humor (in the early stages of the project Thurber thought he might actually be a good piece of casting), a poor reflection of the author's funny and sad secret journey into these little-noted recesses of the quietly despairing everyday mind. But the film retained just enough contact to touch that secret place in a lot of moviegoers. Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.


TO ENTER "THE SECRET WORLD
OF WALTER MITTY," CLICK HERE


THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "Joyeux Noël, Mr. Durning"

AGAIN WE BRACKET "A RIDE WITH OLYMPY" WITH THE
SEMENTZOFF FAMILY SEQUEL, "JOYEUX NOËL, MR. DURNING"

[Note: It's largely on the strength of the "Ride with Olympy" connection that I chose "Joyeux Noël, Mr. Durning" over the other great Thurber "correspondence saga," "File and Forget." But since we're not going to be reprising the latter, at least not this week, I want to make sure everyone remembers about it. -- Ken]



Last night we made the acquaintance of Maria and Olympy Sementzoff via Thurber's 1938 account of the famous "Ride With Olympy" on Cap d'Antibes. Now we jump over World War II and several years beyond to this sort-of-sequel, which appeared originally in The New Yorker of July 2, 1949. -- Ken


IT STARTED AS AN INNOCENT CHRISTMAS GIFT FROM ABROAD.
IT TURNED INTO "JOYEUX NOËL, MR. DURNING" -- CLICK HERE


THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "A Ride with Olympy"

AS I WROTE ORIGINALLY, IN DECEMBER:

"A Ride With Olympy" first appeared in the New Yorker of April 30, 1938. It was collected in My World and Welcome to It (1942) and then appeared in The Thurber Carnival. As we'll see tomorrow night, there's a reason -- apart from the story's own considerable pleasures -- why we're visiting it. -- Ken


FOR OUR ENCORE PRESENTATION OF
"A RIDE WITH OLYMPY," CLICK HERE


THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "The Night the Bed Fell" from "My Life and Hard Times"

Some nights she threw them all.

by Ken

We eventually covered most of Thurber's 1933 fictionalized autobiography My Life and Hard Times (see the series index), starting with the "Preface to a Life." The book, which was reproduced in whole in the invaluable 1945 anthology The Thurber Carnival, may have been too successful for the author's eventual liking, because for a lot of readers it set the tone of inspired goofiness which they then wanted him to sustain the rest of his career, while there were lots of other kinds of writing he wanted to do -- often very funny, yes, but not quite as uncomplicatedly zany as My Life and Hard Times.

Still, I can't think of a better place to start our week of Thurber "encore presentations" (with apologies again to Car Talk's Tom and Ray) than with the first of the autobiography's ten chapters, "The Night the Bed Fell."


FOR OUR ENCORE PRESENTATION OF
"THE NIGHT THE BED FELL," CLICK HERE


THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Bob Mankoff pays tribute to James Thurber's decisive role "in shaping the modern 'New Yorker' cartoon"

This is the cartoon with which, Bob Mankoff says, Thurber changed the course of cartooning "in one fell swoop" in 1932.

by Ken

I indicated in my first quick take Sunday night on the celebration of Thurber earlier that evening at the 92nd Street Y ringmastered by Keith Olbermann that I would probably want to come back to it, and even after sort of doing so parenthetically in my Tuesday post about Keith's Rolling Stone interview remarks about Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw, I knew that there was lots of important stuff still left out.

Most importantly, perhaps, I hadn't more than mentioned the presence of New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff. Happily, Bob gives us his take on the event in his Cartoon Desk blogpost this week. As I've mentioned, you can also sign up -- for free! -- to have Bog's weekly blogposts delivered directly to your e-mailbox, and those blogposts are probably the happy-makingest thing I can look forward to finding there. Let me repeat my previous instructions, "On the home page, look down on the right side for a tab that gives you checkboxes for two weekly NEWSLETTERS: "This Week" and "Cartoons," and this time add a link for the home page, newyorker.com. Also, it's been a full four days since I blogged about Bob's blogposts ("The results of The New Yorker's search for a universal cartoon caption").

First let me say that seeing and hearing Bob in person was a treat and an insight. In his blogposts he seems so calm and logical; in person, he's kind of a wild man -- though an extremely calm and logical wild man. I'm delighted to have his account of Sunday's program. More important; he's made it possible for me to share with you the presentation he offered, which I was dreading having to try to characterize in clumsy paraphrase.

"I gave a little presentation," he writes, "claiming that, important as Thurber was to humor writing, he was even more influential in shaping the modern New Yorker cartoon."


AND HERE IS BOB'S PRESENTATION

In the early twentieth century, cartoons were illustrated anecdotes.


The same style was found in the early days of The New Yorker.


Even this refreshingly less stilted and beloved cartoon from 1928 cartoon from 1928 comes from the same template:


Something more refreshing was needed, and James Thurber provided it in one fell swoop in 1932.


That year, Thurber published an astonishing forty-two cartoons in the magazine. Other swoops -- by Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and others -- would follow, but Thurber’s was the earliest and the swoopiest. His minimalist but expressive style, later adopted by such diverse talents as Charles Barsotti, Roz Chast, Bruce Eric Kaplan (BEK), and Michael Maslin, turned out to be the perfect vehicle for delineating the small things in life which loom so large.


It was also suited to permitting the interplay between fantasy and reality that let cartoons go anywhere the imagination could take a cartoonist. Thurber created the prototype for this genre in that annus mirabilis, 1932:

* * *

BY THE WAY, WE'VE HAD BOTH THURBER'S AND E. B. WHITE'S
ACCOUNTS OF THE SEAL-CARTOON -- OR SO I THOUGHT

Thurber's appeared in an "author's memoir" he wrote in 1950 for a new edition of his first published collection of drawings, The Seal in the Bedroom and other predicaments (1932), which I reproduced in this October 2006 post. White's more detailed account appeared in his introduction for a new edition of the book he cowrote with Thurber, Is Sex Necessary?, originally published in 1929. I'm assuming that I reproduced it in the promised follow-up post to the above, but I'll be darned if I can find it, and I'm wondering whether this was one of those follow-up posts I promised and somehow never got around to writing.

I have found a December 2010 post in which I claimed to be linking back to the post that contained the White version, but on checking that link, it turns out to be to the post I've just linked to. So for the moment you'll have to do with Thurber's more limited account. I think we'll have to schedule White's Is Sex Necessary introduction for an "E. B. White Tonight" post. (First I'll have to find the replacement copy for my missing one which I was so thrilled to have acquired online for a penny.)

OH YES, A FOOTNOTE TO THAT THURBER CARTOON
ANNUS MIRABILUS OF 1932

Bob Mankoff is amazed by that year in which Thurber published 42 cartoons in The New Yorker. In Sunday's panel, that great writer Calvin Trillin recalled having discovered in the magazine archives that in one year (if he mentioned which year, I didn't catch it) he published 51 casuals, the magazine's term for what we would call humor pieces. Trillin recalled being impressed with himself the year he topped a fellow writer by breaking their tie and having his sixth published. "One a week?" he mused.

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