Laughter from the pages of history

We Americans spend a lot of time fretting about the news, whether on TV, in newspapers, or local rumor. We forget that bad news has been around since before we were born.

But so has its antidote – laughter.

Even old folks remember how to laugh.

Back in the 1880s, a math teacher, Charles Dodgson (pen name Lewis Carroll), wrote poetry to deride the pompous and the overly serious scholars of his day:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things:

Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax; of cabbages and kings.

And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.”

Or (same author, commenting on children versus parents):

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,

“And your hair has become very white,

And yet you incessantly stand on your head,

Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,

“I feared it might injure the brain.

But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,

Why, I do it again and again.”

The son goes on asking questions, and finally,

“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose

That your eye was as steady as ever.

Yet you balance an eel on the end of your nose!

What made you so dreadfully clever?”

“I have answered three questions and that is enough,”

said his father, “Don’t give yourself airs!

Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?

Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!”

A generation later, after World War I had given way to the twenties, Don Marquis came along with his interviews of Mehitabel the alley cat, and Archie, the office cockroach. The latter wrote poetry by climbing up on the typewriter and diving off to hit a key, one at a time; his offerings were all in lower case type because he couldn’t operate the shift key:

time, time, said old king tut,

is what i aint got nothing but.

Or:

if all the prose that i have penned were stretched together end to end,

twould reach from russia to south bend indiana

and if all the poems i have wrote were boiled together in a kettle

twould make a meal for every goat from nome to popocatapetl mexico

Fast forward to World War Two, Johnny Mercer, and all of the GI’s in army basic training:

This is the GI jive, man alive,

It starts with the bugler blowin’ reveille over your bed when you arrive;

Man, that’s the GI jive

Rootly toot, jump in your suit, give a salute – ( lieut! )

After you wash and dress, more or less,

You go get your breakfast in a beautiful little cafe they call the mess.

Man, while you convalesce,

Out of your seat, into the street, make with the feet. - (reet!)

If you’re a P-V-T your du-ty is to salute the L-I-E-U-T

But if you brush the L-I-E-U-T, the M-P gives you K- P on the Q-T . . . .

One American had a job during that war, writing anti-Nazi propaganda. Losing that job in 1945, he turned his attention to writing children’s poetry under the pen name “Dr. Seuss” and even a lot of adults became addicted to his work. One passage from one of his books, “Sneetches and Other Stories”:

Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave had twenty-three sons and she named them all Dave?

Well, she did. And that wasn’t a smart thing to do. You see, when she wants one and calls out “Yoo-Hoo! Come into the house, Dave!” she doesn’t get one. All twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run!

This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves’ as you can imagine, with so many Daves.

And often she wishes that when they were born,

She had named one of them Bodkin Van Horn

And one of them Hoos Foos. And one of them Snimm.

[And she goes on with each . . . and finally, ]

And one of them Sir Michael Carmichael Zutt And one of them Oliver Boliver Butt

And one of them Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate . . .

But she didn’t do it. And now it’s too late.

In the 1970s, many of us found humor in pictures.

I recall a parade in San Francisco, I took a photo of a hippy who was totally stoned, sitting cross-legged on the pavement, oblivious to the California state cop confronting him in bewilderment.

Or my sitting in a restaurant with my family, glad that my father was seated with his back to the window while the Dykes on Bikes roared by in all their motorcycle regalia.

Now in April, 2017 with our countrymen politically polarized and the national government functionally paralyzed, where shall we find our humor?

Not to worry --- the British magazine that just arrived in the mail pictures on its cover a large hole in a green lawn, with the White House standing in lonely splendor not far off.

A golf club is spraying sand upward from the hole, the golfer already too deep to see . . .