Miller - American cornball: a laffopedic guide to the formerly funny

SMALL CAPS indicate cross-references to other entries.

Eaten by bears: see 2 Kings 2:2325. Is laughter a sin? The biblical case against it is stronger than that against onanism. Cf. Ecclesiastes 2:2: I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it? Ecclesiastes 7:6: For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool: now this also is vanity.

See, for example, The Rhetoric of Racist Humour, by Simon Weaver; Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester, by Joseph Boskin; Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, by Donald Bogle; Thats Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 19001960, by Henry T. Sampson; Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture, by John Strausbaugh; African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor, by Robin R. Means Coleman.

Beginning in 1926, Captain Fawcett also published a similar magazine called Smokehouse Monthly; smokehouse was his favored synonym for outhouse.

A semi-jocular 1930s abbreviation for biological urgein other words, lust.

Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible, wrote Frank Moore Colby more than a hundred years agoa strikingly prescient remark, considering that Colby wrote before the advent of radio, television, email, chat rooms, blogs, Twitter, or texting, or everyday telephony.

Strictly speaking, Charlie Brown wasnt a born loser: for the first year or two of the strip, he was more often portrayed as a mischievous kid like Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes. Nor did he initially wear a striped sweater.

Theres something close to a consensus that Schopenhauer is the funniest philosopherthe best name to use in cases like this, where any philosophers name would be funny. (At one point he had his own entry in this guide.) In Ira Gershwins Isnt It a Pity?, two infatuated lovebirds lament that they didnt meet sooner:

(He) Isnt it a pity we never met before?

Imagine all the lonely years weve wasted...

You reading Heine, me somewhere in China....

(She) What joys untasted,

My nights were sour

Spent with Schopenhauer....

The book and its author are real.

dainty dish to set before the king?), since the same advertisers who urged women to douche with Lysol (Leaves you wonderfully fresh and sweet) also tried to persuade them that they would thereby revive their husbands waning appetites for MARRIED SEX.

In the mid-twentieth century, castor oil was used not only as a medicine but as a punishment. Mussolini was using it as such when Baby Puss was made; he force-fed it to dissidents in quantities large enough to cause severe and sometimes lethal diarrhea. He reportedly got the idea from Gabriele dAnnunzioanother reminder that poets should never, ever have a hand in politics.

And of sexism in general. No woman has ever set foot in Little America, the most silent and peaceful place in the world, observed Richard Byrd on returning from Antarctica in 1955.

A limerick from 1941:

A bobby of Nottingham Junction

Whose organ had long ceased to function

Deceived his good wife

For the rest of her life

With the aid of his constables truncheon.

Was that era touched off by Im So Lonesome I Could Cry, written and recorded by Hank Williams in 1949?

The novelty barbecue aprons of the mid-twentieth centurywith messages like Kiss the Chef and comic illustrationswere mainly aimed at males, like the crying towels of that era (see CRYBABIES AND WHINERS, and like crying towels they reflected male anxieties about effeminacy. They belonged to the same school of corny, never-funny comic art as the towels, or the jokey cocktail napkins produced in such abundance in the 1950s that they still clutter liquor cabinets everywhere. The aprons had to be facetious because Real Men Dont Cook, just as real men dont cry.

A dowager college professor is also possible, of course, and I know for a fact that the creature exists. Sadly it cannot be here discussed: an academic dowager encountering the infra dig is such a fearsome sight that not even laughter-lovers, if they know whats good for them, will set her bosom to heaving.

Fibber: I was a baseball pitcher in my younger days.

Molly: I never knew that. Southpaw?

Fibber: Nope, Midwest, maw.

In the Moon Mullins Game, a 1938 roll-and-move board game based on the comic strip, bumping into a fat lady causes you to move back two spaces.

Theres a fair amount of fecal matter even in Yeats, as in the lines from Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop that so perfectly encapsulate the Swiftian view of the subject:

A woman may be proud and stiff

When on love intent,

But love has pitched his mansion

In the place of excrement.

The poem on the title poem certainly sounds like Swift:

A FART, tho wholesome, does not fail,

If barrd of Puffage by the Tail,

To fly back to the Head again,

And by its Fumes disturb the Brain:

Thus Gunpowder confind, you know Sir,

Grows stronger as tis rammd the closer;

But if in open Air it fires,

In harmless Smoke its Force expires.

It took a while for the copywriters at Johnson Smith to hit on this wording. In the 1935 catalog, the cushion gives forth the most indescribable noises that can be better imagined than described. By 1944, though, the pleonasm had been fixed, so they do sometimes revise the seemingly fossilized catalog copy. Back in 1929, incidentally, the effects of the Jumping Frog, Joke Toilet Paper, and Electric Push Button were also lazily described as better imagined than described.

The reason whoopee cushions counterfeit the sound so well is presumably that the real thing is produced by the same means: a small self-sealing aperture that vibrates audibly when gas forces its way through. At least, I assume, now that I stop and think, that thats what accounts for the noise when we fart. Its strange to think that I could reach the age I have without knowing for sure.

On The Addams Family, Uncle Fester treats his headaches by squeezing his head in a vise.

In his Historical Dictionary of American Slang, J. K. Lighter quotes a funny sentence from 1888 to substantiate the use of astonisher as journalistic slang for exclamation point: What in three dashes, two hyphens, and an astonisher do you want here! (Nye and Riley, Railway, 1888). Other journalistic synonyms for exclamation point include screamer, shout, and bang, whence interrobang for the combination question mark and exclamation point: !?

Like many comic-strip characters of his era, Castor OylOlive Oyls brotherwas an INVENTOR; his inventions included a nonparkable chewing gum.

The Blacksmith also contains the supremely cartoonish gag of a childs helium balloon used in place of a jack to hold up the front end of a car while the tire is changed.

One problem with this formula is the suggestion that the less common cartoon clichs are therefore less cartoonish. In real life, as far as Im aware, women hardly ever burst out of giant phony cakes; if not quite as unheard-of as a hat take, or a dollar bill flying off on tiny wings, the stripper in the cake is surely rare enough to rate an incidence of 1.5 at most. But its also fairly rare in cartoonsat most a 3. So its KI is only 2.0, which wrongly makes it sound five times less cartoonish than hat takes.

My laff-loving editor, Cal, takes issue with my contention that the harpy-wife-and-henpecked-husband clich is, if not extinct, at least endangered. In Cals opinioncompounded of what mixture of reflection, observation, and hard-won life experience he alone can saythe clich still flourishes but has morphed into a different animal, the Stupid Husband whos always getting things wrong around the house in modern TV commercials, causing the All-Knowing Wife to roll her head and smile indulgently, infantilizing her man.