This past summer, as I sat in a movie theater about to watch Girl Shy (1924), a nine-decade-old comedy starring Harold Lloyd, I wondered what the uninitiated audience would think. This was a silent movie, and it isn’t easy to trade spoken dialogue for pantomime. And then there was the star of the production: Although Lloyd is my own favorite of the silent comic actors, to utter his name to most people under the age of, say, 70 is to risk the rebuttal, “Harold who?” Yet, in spite of everything, Girl Shy worked, both for me and, judging by their laughter, for many others in the audience—most of whom, to my eyes, were under 70. Our laughs were hearty, unfaked, unironic.
I was pleasantly surprised, then, to find an approving mention of Girl Shy in this all-inclusive guide to purportedly passé humor. American Cornball marches through dozens of topics (alphabetically arranged) that, its author argues, were long ago grist for America’s comic mill but are no more. These topics include “cops and nightsticks,” “hats, women’s,” “henpecked husbands,” and “midnight snacks.” Girl Shy comes up in the entry on “nincompoops.” Therein, Miller tange-tially discusses the adjective “bashful” when used to refer to “male shyness vis-à-vis women,” and Girl Shy, with its central character’s reticent stance towards the opposite sex, fits the bill.
Although Christopher Miller claims to appreciate humor that deviates from what he calls “the usual joke about men and sex . . . that it’s all men think about,” he admits, earlier in the same sentence, that jokes lobbed affectionately in the direction of bashful males are “seldom very funny.” Tell that to the audience who guffawed at Girl Shy. The somewhat shaky premise of American Cornball is that most of the comic categories it discusses—romantically timid bachelors among them—have lost their capacity to bring forth laughs. “Some are still good for a laugh,” Miller writes, “but few are as funny as they used to be, and the most laughable thing about many is that people did once find them funny.”
To be sure, Miller—blessed with seemingly limitless recall of not just movies but comic strips, postcards, and wisecracks from the first half of the 20th century—has produced a fair share of clunkers to back up his assertion. The laughter-inducing properties of, say, Limburger cheese or old maids have certainly dimmed with time, and Miller is right to remind us how much blatantly racist and sexist humor was once in general circulation. On the other hand, to leaf through these pages is to be reminded of American humor’s ample treasures, many of which have aged rather well. There is enduring wisdom in Preston Sturges’s 1941 litany for comic success, quoted here, in part: “A kitten is better than a dog. A baby is better than a kitten. A kiss is better than a baby. A pratfall is better than anything.” Don’t these preferences still hold true?
From time to time, Miller goes against his premise—that much of the humor he describes is démodé—and lets his enthusiasm get the better of him, as when he recounts the abundance of tumbling anvils in 1950s Looney Tunes cartoons. Going! Going! Gosh! (1952), for example, features Wile E. Coyote aloft in a weather balloon, with anvil in tow. But after he lets go of the anvil, with Road Runner below, “the balloon deflates and the coyote and his garbage cart plunge groundward, passing the anvil on the way down (because, as the Ninth Law of Cartoon Physics mandates, ‘Everything falls faster than an anvil’).” Naturally, the anvil strikes Wile E. Coyote.
No matter the decade, it would seem, anvil-based gags (like piano- or safe-based gags, also discussed here) are reliably riotous.
So are pie fights, which Miller writes about with similar thoughtfulness and appreciation. Discussing the supersized pie fight included in the Jack Lemmon/Tony Curtis farce The Great Race (1965), Miller notes that “when an already-pie-spattered character” is struck repeatedly, the joke loses its punch: “That’s why the director, Blake Edwards, waits till the end of the scene before the charmed, immaculate, white-suited Tony Curtis is finally pied.”
Miller is at his strongest when tracing the lineage of (or explaining the logic behind) comic characters and situations. He has done his homework. For example, he knows that the comic strip “Bringing Up Father” popularized the image of a housewife using a rolling pin to attack her husband, and that the Murphy bed was already being milked for laughs the same year it was made available on the market (1900). Not only are these backstories interesting and well told, Miller’s descriptions of individual scenes or ideas are often very funny—even when he insists that what he is describing is not.
Miller misunderstands how pop culture survives the decades. A particular joke may no longer play if transposed to our time, but that does not mean the original loses its efficacy. In other words, while Steve Carell contending with a Murphy bed would probably leave much to be desired, Charlie Chaplin contending with one—in One A.M. (1916)—retains its appeal.
The humor itemized in American Cornball sometimes has another thing going for it beyond continued funniness: a pleasingly moralistic perspective. Humor in America used to target behavior that was commonly frowned upon, like gum-chewing or drunkenness, as well as unsavory personality types, such as layabouts (see the entry on “brothers-in-law”) or those seeking instant wealth (see the entry on “get-rich-quick schemes”). Discussing the familiar sight in single-panel cartoons of a drunk being given the heave-ho by a bartender, Miller writes: “The image of a drunk being tossed out of a rough bar is especially funny to people who never set foot in rough bars, only hasten past, and for whom the drunks tossed out the door suggest the unimaginable rowdiness within.” In his entry on “bums,” Miller describes the fine distinction drawn by Nancy, namesake of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip, when it comes to indigents in her town: “Hunger gets her sympathy, but sloth just gets her goat.”
In fact, some of what was subject to ridicule in the humor of yesteryear is relevant in our own nanny state: In the entry on “do-gooders,” Miller writes that the typical example of such was “a middle-class man, probably college-educated, and in any case convinced that he knew more than blue-collar workers about their own jobs and lives.” Sound familiar? There was even occasionally a preachy quality to old-time comedy, apparent in a postcard urging bachelors to consider married life: We see a bedraggled man with holes in his trousers, accompanied by a caption stating, “Wanted: A Wife Who Can Sew, That’s All!” A surefire way to promote marriage among the unattached, Miller writes, was “to convince them and their married counterparts that men can’t cook, and need to marry if they want to eat well.”
Peter Tonguette is at work on a book about Peter Bogdanovich.
