Everybody loves humor. It’s as close to a universal as exists in the world. Humor is a basic in every country, in every language, and in every form. Stand-up comedy, movies and television, songs, musical theater, cartoons, comic books and strips, memes, books. I’m a humor buff. I’ve read, or seen, or listened to humor in all its forms.
But my special niche is books. I collect books. So I collect humor. Obsessively. Books of humor, about humor, examining humor, anthologizing humor, honoring humor. Books written to make people laugh, to tell the stories of the people who make others laugh, to study what makes people laugh. Books by and about the great names in the field, plus hundreds of lesser names and names who have been utterly forgotten. I have a literal library’s worth of humor, thousands of books, bookcases up to the ceiling and under windows and tucked into closets.
Formally, I call the core collection American 20th Century Prose Humor. Realistically, I’ve learned that humor is slippery and impossible to pin down. Each word in that definition is suspect. American. I have every book by and about Monty Python, the epitome of British humor, because how could I not? 20th Century. I’ve sought some treasures by 19th Century greats like Josh Billings and Bill Nye and twenty years worth of books from this current century. Prose. A bookcase or two contains books on cartoons (still and animated), comic strips, comic books, even editorial cartoons. Humor. Memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, histories, analyses are not necessarily funny; nevertheless, they are critical to understanding humor and its commanding place in culture. As one example, Charlie Chaplin made his mark over a century ago but people cannot stop digging into every minute of his life and every second of his movies, dozens of books on him alone.
Collections should never stop growing. Mine grew like a science-fiction blob, expanding in all directions, overrunning shelves, to cover more subjects in greater depth. Just as importantly, I strive to improve the quality of the books I own wherever possible. I’ve spent most of the past year upgrading the collection, ensuring that I had every title by important authors, replacing paperbacks with hardcovers, finding copies complete with the book jacket, looking for the earliest releases, studying and researching to add authors and titles that were new to me, yet historically important. The core collection is now comprised of first editions and first printings, and complete with the book jacket where issued, except for a few of the earliest and most impossible to find. On the other hand, I have some extremely scarce items that I was fortunate to stumble upon.
From scattered books on a subject I loved, all that miscellaneous humor has matured into a true collection. As such, it contains many names and titles that most people, even humor buffs, almost certainly aren’t familiar with although they once were famous bestsellers. I’ve written hundreds of articles elsewhere bringing back lost histories that were printed in books, and magazines, and websites. Dipping into the depths of my collection and writing another set of articles bringing those forgotten names back to life meant sharing fun. What could be better?
The product is this site, Great Forgotten Humorists.
Examples. George Ade became the first millionaire from humor. Forgotten. Corey Ford wrote a parody novel that became a number one bestseller. Forgotten. Charles Wayland Towne was saved from the “grubline” when a book sold nearly 200,000 copies. Forgotten. Topping them all is Chic Sale, a vaudevillian who had a monolog bound and sold to protect it from copyright thieves, and saw the tiny volume hit the million mark within a year, selling more than another million since. Forgotten.
Each page I will regularly add on a new forgotten humorist will present a full history of their humor-writing lives, much of it gathered from newspaper archives and not available anywhere else on the internet, as well as a bibliography of all their humor books with images taken directly from my collection.
I couldn’t stop there. I’ve started adding articles on humor books that don’t have a single author, but share a quirky theme that’s also been forgotten. I’ve added a section on authors who have one book too special to ignore. Another section selects the quirkiest titles, maybe not deserving of a page, but worthy of a paragraph, and puts them on display. Every book that I pick up off one of my shelves has a story to tell. My specialty is telling stories no one has properly researched before. I have piles of books beside my computer that are calling for me to tell their stories. Those I’m beginning with are just the start to what I hope will be many more.
Please go back to the Homepage to explore the Forgotten Humorists and the newer sections.
Too good not to share is my motto for this entire site. Dive in!
Great Forgotten Humorists 
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