Radio Troubador

AMERICAN HUMOR IN THE 1950S would be less defined by television, which was still in its infancy, than by radio (and the radio shows that made their transition to television), and by humor magazines such as MAD, especially its earliest incarnation in comic book form.

It would be defined also by the edgy, intellectual nightclub comics, from Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl to Nichols and May; and it would be greatly influenced by the last faint voices of radio as that medium began to die away: Stan Freberg, who parodied radio commercials, Bob and Ray, perhaps the most ingenious of the group, and the brilliant monologist Jean Shepherd.

When “Shep” entered radio, it was as if everyone had simply abandoned the broadcast booth, leaving everything still up and running, including an open mike for someone with a lot of imagination to do as he pleased. Jean Shepherd did just that, spinning yarns of his Midwestern childhood. Notes Eugene Bergmann: “There was a continual elaboration and enrichment with new detail, a continuing entertaining funniness as well as wit, and his listeners found intellectual pleasures in apprehending his mind at work.”

Jean Shepherd paved the way for contemporary figures, from Spalding Gray to Howard Stern. And this book’s title comes from an infamous hoax Shepherd perpetrated, when he asked his listeners to go to bookstores and ask for a nonexistent book called I, Libertine. When the clerk would ask who published it, the listener was to respond, “Excelsior, you fathead!”

Growing up in Hammond, Indiana, a small, steel mill town he reinvented as Hohman, Shepherd listened to all the old radio programs. His favorites were Vic and Sadie, Little Orphan Annie, Jack Benny, and Fred Allen. A more direct precursor may have been the droll comic Henry Morgan, who ad-libbed his monologues and knocked his sponsors, once accusing the makers of Life Savers of cheating the customer by punching little holes through their mints.

The few radio shows that did last until the 1960s, including some surviving soap operas and Arthur Godfrey in the mornings, were for the moms who stayed home and the retirees who never left their rocking chairs. As music and DJs began to take over the airwaves, Shepherd (on WOR in New York) catered to the off-hour listeners, the Night People, his loyal Baby Boomer fans, for whom he provided a cynical brand of Midwestern humor filled with red state, blue collar perceptiveness, which, as he said of Jack Benny, “was the humor of attitude.” If it seems dated today, it is only because it was never vulgar. Pungent, irreverent, funny, but also rather nostalgic or, at times, as he reminded people, “anti-nostalgic.”

Unfortunately, Jean Shepherd will not be remembered for his radio programs, as Bob and Ray still are, even though Bergmann provides generous selections from his radio transcriptions. Those improvisational narratives are not scripted literary gems in the way Winston Churchill’s or C.S. Lewis’s radio broadcasts were, although there are joyous moments (“I’m a constant observer of cracks in the sidewalk”). But Shepherd left behind a small but impressive collection of fiction/memoir/essays (his work defies any single genre, really), many of which are important contributions to American literary humor of the Depression era and postwar America he would come to satirize, and which certainly belong in the company of the best of Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, James Thurber, and S.J. Perelman.

Shepherd was in his late seventies when he died in 1999, and it surprised most people that he was that old. He had grown up during the Depression, and his stories are set in those memorable years. If there is a war going on, it is in the background (he entered the army in 1942). Yet he describes not so much a place and time as an idea of America, which can be 1962 as easily as it was 1932.

Apparently his father–who figures prominently in many of the stories, sometimes fondly, sometimes resentfully–was “somewhat dull-witted and pedestrian,” and may have left Shepherd’s mother for an office secretary. His stories, involving Ralph/Ralphie (Shepherd’s alter ego), Schwartz, Bruner, and Flick were about the angst of growing up in what only feel like halcyon days–and how intimidating they could be. But he never strayed from the core values of America, which he loved deeply, criticized openly, and defended passionately. He wrote valentines to American icons and rituals: county fairs, family vacations, baseball, junior proms, Army life, and Fourth of July picnics.

Shepherd’s settings were the steel mills, the Bluebird Tavern, and Warren G. Harding Elementary School; his subjects, “slob art,” “Creeping Meatballism,” “effluvia,” and “glop”; his characters, the backbreaking laborers and office grunts for whom “there’s nothing like a cold Blatz and the end of a hard day.”

Were it not for the perennial Christmas movie he wrote (A Christmas Story), and a small but faithful legion of followers, Shepherd would be all but forgotten today, like another humorist of the early 20th century, George Ade, about whom Shepherd wrote his first book. He felt largely ignored in his own time, and begrudged the neglect. The fact that he narrated all of his movies means that he might live on in some small, indefinite way. He did numerous cameos: In Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss, he plays Mr. Scott, who looks like “a cross between Rasputin and the Wolf Man.” Anyone who visits the World of Tomorrow at Epcot Center will hear his voice span the decades of American progress.

There are a few problems with this book. For one, it’s too long, and several facts are mentioned more than twice. It offers too much psychobiography, unnecessary inquiry, and didacticism, sometimes all wrapped up in a single paragraph. For example: “Thus, we encounter a Jean Shepherd not only vastly more accomplished artistically than we may once have imagined, but at the same time we see a man vastly deeper, darker, more damaged–which is both baffling and disconcerting. Disconcerting because we must realize that youthful, optimistic assumptions and enthusiasms may rest on insecure foundations–and we walk at our peril over cracks in the sidewalks.”

You have to cut through a lot of verbiage to get to what might be a salient observation.

In the end, however, it hardly matters whether Shepherd’s “tales and parables . . . may or may not have been partly true to fact.” What he created were myths of America that nearly anyone could identify with, and revealed essential truths. When Ralph sees that he will not take the most beautiful girl in the school to the junior prom, but will instead ask “that nice Wanda Hickey,” he realizes “there was no sense fighting it. Some guys are born to dance forever with the Daphne Bigelows on shining ballroom floors under endless starry skies. Others–well, they do the best they can.” It doesn’t matter that ballroom floors are not under starry skies; we get the picture. We, too, like Ralph, “are beginning to suspect something.”

That something was the truth about life in the great American middle class. Jean Shepherd would find fault with those who trashed those virtues of America, “the country he loved,” writes Bergmann, “and which he defended against the frequent putdowns and disparagements heard in the 1960s and 1970s.” If he criticized America and Americans, it was for squandering those virtues.

Richard Orodenker, who teaches at Penn State Abington, is editor of The Phillies Reader.