'No Honest Fun in the Cracking of Skulls'

“I crave low comedy, of the lowest and most humorous sort laid on with a shovel, rammed in with a slapstick, soaked with a seltzer siphon.”

 

More than DNA our sense of humor distinguishes us from the rest of the herd and is a reliable gauge of mental health. If not insane, the humorless at least deserve close observation. They cannot be trusted. Loud, moist, Falstaffian laughter for them is a social lapse, like farting at a funeral, though I’ve known people with a well-developed sense of humor who hardly titter. Their laughs are events of the interior. That’s foreign to me but I respect it, and distinguish it from those who don’t laugh at all because they are twits and bores. Who can imagine Lenin laughing?

 

The speaker at the top is H.L. Mencken in “A Plea for Comedy,” a column he published on this date, May 28, in 1910 in the Baltimore Evening Sun. Mencken is celebrating vaudeville, America’s then popular and widely condemned contribution to world culture. Historians tells us vaudeville was at the start of its decline around the time Mencken was writing, thanks to early forms of cinema. Many of us know vaudeville by way of its survivors who thrived in the movies – Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Burns and Allen, and latecomers like the Three Stooges of the pre-Shemp Curly era. Not, thank you, Abbott and Costello. Mencken writes:

 

“There are bilious and inhuman folk who maintain that low comedy is not amusing; that it is not pleasant to see the first comedian wallop the second comedian over the head with a rubber ax; that there is no honest fun in the cracking of skulls. Let us pity all who think so! They miss a lot in life.”

 

Vaudeville, of course, is dead, and I fear its spirit remains on life supports. What kills it is earnestness, the wish to propagate a message. Nothing is deadlier to comedy than a dogged dedication to didacticism. In 1942, Max Beerbohm spoke on the BBC about the English counterpart to American vaudeville in “Music Halls of My Youth”:  

 

“Perhaps you will blame me for having spent so much of my time in Music Halls, so frivolously, when I should have been sticking to my books, burning the midnight oil and compassing the larger latitude. But I am impenitent. I am inclined to think, indeed I have always thought, that a young man who desires to know all that in all ages and in all lands has been thought by the best minds, and wishes to make a synthesis of all those thoughts for the future benefit of mankind, is laying up for himself a very miserable old age.”