Great Forgotten Humorists

From Steve Carper’s collection of thousands of humor books, a look at some names you’ve unfortunately forgotten about, along with other weird and seldom seen items.

ABOUT THE COLLECTION

If we look back into past times, we find innumerable names of authors once high in reputation, read perhaps by the beautiful, quoted by the witty, and commented by the grave, but of whom we now know only that they once existed. — Samuel Johnson

ELECTION SPECIAL!

For the first time anywhere, the complete history of presidential campaign books by humorists. Included are books by some of the country’s most famous comedians, some of the least famous, and some who didn’t exist at all. No matter how wild that sounds, the reality was far weirder. An epic-length article, fully stuffed with images you’ve probably never seen before.

Our Next President?

THE HUMORISTS

Will Cuppy

The Smiths – Elinor Goulding and Robert Paul

SINGULAR GOODNESS
Authors who wrote one notable book of humor

Thomas Meehan

Edward Sorel

Sylvia Wright

MORE FORGOTTEN FUN

MISCELLANEOUS RARITIES FROM MY COLLECTION

Droodles, by Roger Price (Simon & Schuster, 1953)

Someone actually invented Mad Libs and that someone was Roger Price, comedian, satirist, jokewriter, and all-around wit. Droodles came first. Droodles (a pun on doodles, of course) were kid-level drawings with a snappy and totally unexpected caption turning the doodle into a delightful visual pun. First published in May 1953 in This Week magazine, a Sunday supplement included with tens of millions of newspapers, Droodles exploded as a national fad faster than Davy Crockett or hula hoops. Simon & Schuster jumped on the prospect and published a book of them later in the year. It sold a million copies, and later Droodles book appeared in English and a bunch of other languages. So fantastically popular were Droodles that a short-lived game show with witty panelists suggesting captions was shown on NBC in 1954. Price co-founded the publishing house of Price/Stern/Sloan to publish Mad Libs and other humor books, many of which I have in my collection. (But not Price’s own prose humor books, oddly.) Feel free to make up your captions for the ones not given on the cover below.

Riding High!, by David Milton Proctor (Brown Publishing Company, 1939)

David Milton Proctor was a prominent attorney in Kansas City who got elected to the Missouri State Senate as a Republican. The Democratic Pendergast political machine that controlled Kansas City politics – and launched Harry S. Truman’s career – infuriated him and he launched a righteous crusade against them. Perhaps not so righteous was his far greater fury against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In 1936 he penned a satiric book of letters, Pay Day, as from a Missouri farmer to his son in college berating FDR’s farming policy. With nothing changed, in his opinion, he wrote Riding High!, a similar book of letters from a constituent to his Senator in Washington in 1939. Weird enough in own right, my copy is even weirder. It is imprinted with “Mr. W. Harry Vance” on the cover, who also signed the book “Compliments of W. H. Vance” in large handwriting. Vance, also a Kansas City Republican, was “associated” – the word used by a contemporary newspaper – with Brown Book Company, the publisher (under various names) of Proctor’s books. All I can assume is that Vance loved the book so much, he had copies printed with his name on the cover to hand out to Republican supporters. Unique in all my experience.

The History of Negro Humor in America, by William Schechter (Fleet Press Corporation, 1970)

Willliam Schechter was not an academic, but in 1970 he wrote the first comprehensive history of black humor that I know of. The book covers the subject from plantation humor to the then-contemporary work of Flip Wilson, Bill Cosby, and Dick Gregory. Contains many rare early pictures that seem outrageous today but are critical to understanding history.

The Lover’s Baedeker and Guide to Arcady, by Carolyn Wells (Frederick A. Stokes, 1912)

Tolkien didn’t invent the fantasyland novel, complete with maps and discussions of how the world worked. I’m not sure who did it first, but I know that Carolyn Wells created one back in 1912. Wells was astoundingly prolific: she is credited with 170 novels, mostly mysteries and Young Adult. She also was almost as obsessed with humor as I am. A series of anthologies of humorous poetry appeared in the first years of the 20th Century. Her Arcady is a spoof on love and marriage, a Baedeker (travel guide) with illustrations by A. D. Blashfield and maps by George W. Hood.

The Lotus Position, by Lotus Weinstock (Bantam Books, 1982)

There was a time when original books were released in mass-market paperback, the small size to differentiate them from the more prestigious book-sized trade paperbacks. In the 1980s, the publisher Bantam Books created a line of Bantam Humor Books. Most of them were anthologies or joke collections, but they filled a historic gap with Lotus Weinstock’s only book. She started a career as a stand-up comic in the early 1960s, when times were rough for women. Phyllis Diller, who went through that gantlet herself, wrote the introduction. It starts: “It is important to know that Lotus’s mother dropped her on her head three times.”

What Groucho Says, by Groucho (Harper & Brothers, 1930)

Groucho says what? Not the Groucho we all know so well, but an ad man of the 1920s who wrote humorous critiques of the ad world in the magazine Printers’ Ink. Who “Groucho” was might have been an open secret in 1930, for all we know, but he’s anonymous today.

A Day at the Races, by Robert Pirosh, George Seaton, and George Oppenheimer (Faber and Faber, 1993)

It couldn’t be a humor collection without the real Groucho. He’s all over this Farsi edition of the script for A Day at the Races, printed in Iran. Curiously, the script includes an English transcription of the “Gabriel (Who Dat Man)” musical number. Farsi is read right to left, so the spine of this trade paperback is on the reader’s right.