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or WHO KILLED THE HUMOR COLUMN?
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Humor columnists now as
rare as saber-tooth tigers
of TheColumnists.com
When I last wrote a regular humor column for the San Francisco Chronicle in the late 1980s, the four invincible B’s bestrode the newspaper landscape like the Four Horsemen - Buchwald, Baker, Bombeck and Barry, with many other kindred wits riding high: Mike Royko at the Chicago Tribune, Jack Smith, Al Martinez and sportswriter Jim Murray at the Los Angeles Times, Lewis Grizzard at the Atlanta Constitution, Art Hoppe at my own paper, plus assorted newsroom jesters across the land.
It was satisfying to be part of a hallowed journalistic tradition that seemed secure and sure to continue forever but that now appears to be in a persistent vegetative state. Erma Bombeck, Royko, Grizzard, Hoppe, Smith and Murray are dead, Art Buchwald is ailing and had to give up his column, Russell Baker is doing book reviews after a forced, unhappy departure from the New York Times, and Dave Barry recently quit his column at the Miami Herald. Nobody has replaced them and editors don’t even appear to notice they’re gone, leaving a gaping hole in the nation’s humor. So what happened?
James Thurber, in a sour piece written shortly before he died, pronounced the last rites over the twitching body of American humor, which he said had grown neurotic and maudlin. Mike Nichols, in an interview with me a few years ago for my book on the rebel comedians of the 1950s and `60s, noted that when Germany turned totalitarian it lost its sense of humor--he should know, having left Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power. Fascist Germany--not a great humor role model.
I first noticed something was awry while writing a humor column at The Chronicle--readers would comment about this or that “comedy” piece I had done. “Comedy” had subtly replaced “humor,” a dire indication that written humor was being supplanted by oral standup, movie and TV comedy, and that people didn’t recognize the difference--all part of the national erosion of newspaper reading habits. Today, even the term “humor columnist” seems quaint, like “rotogravure” and “society writer.”
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whose column has been retired as his newspaper is being sold. |
Assuming that newspapers are a pretty reliable
barometer to measure America’s humor index, the dismal conclusion
is that maybe the country is losing its sense of humor. In the
past 20 years, it’s become an angry, cynical, sour and sullen
place--not the best climate to hatch a few humor columnists.
The humor column still flourishes in England. The Brits take
themselves far less seriously than Americans; in London’s
newspapers, wits like Oliver Pritchett, Ian Hislop, Jeremy Clarkson
and Hermione Eyre still thrive, not to mention magazines like
Private Eye and the more erratic Punch.
It’s almost as if humor in America is now suspect, subversive,
used mainly as a political weapon for broadsides by our most
venomous wits, all standup comics--Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Al
Franken, Dennis Miller. It’s tempting to trace the decline
of the humor column to the rise of the comedy club, but that’s
not a good enough excuse. During the humor column’s heyday,
comedians circulated everywhere in a separate orbit.
Their best barbs (much of it probably staff written) are available in collections--the only humor you can find in bookstores today, other than comic strip collections and those ubiquitous Dave Barry paperbacks. Barry is in the best column tradition, but he sucked all the humorous air out of newspapers. Because of him, editors got lazy, content to run his column rather than nurture any lurking in-house Barrys and Bakers.
Another bleak omen: when magazines like Playboy felt it necessary to add a kicker--“Humor”--to identify an amusing essay, lest unsuspecting readers not realize it was funny, as if warning them of hazardous wit up ahead. Yet a third failing vital sign of native drollery was the gradual disappearance of campus humor magazines, where most humorists got their start, ex-collegiate funny men like Max Shulman, S.J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, Thurber and about any other major humorist you can think of.
The grandpa of college humor magazines, The Harvard Lampoon, became a national publication and promptly went downhill, descending into cheap sex gags and gross-out humor that grew increasingly, and crudely, lame. The Lampoon began relying less on written essays and more on pictorial features, picking up where Mad left off and wisely didn’t dare to go.
Even Mad, which had begun on such a crackling surge of incisive and satirical wit under Harvey Kurtzman and his staff of inspired artists and writers, began to feel formulaic after Kurtzman left and the magazine decided to appeal to a wider, less New York (i.e., less hip) readership under the safer, more commercial William Gaines. It was still clever but had lost much of its wild and zany--and Jewish--spirit. It became, well, predictable, and one day, sadly, I no longer felt any need to read it.
My own eccentric San Francisco Chronicle, never a great newspaper but always an amusing and slightly daffy one, was drained of its playful spirit after the deaths of Hoppe, Herb Caen (who wasn’t a humor columnist, per se, but whose gossip items were laced with wit, puns and deft one-liners), Charles McCabe, Stanton Delaplane and even acerbic TV critic Terrence O’Flaherty, all of whom died or retired within a few years.
I hung on until 1993, as critic and sometime humor columnist, but when I left the only fulltime syndicated humor columnist of any note was Dave Barry, who became an industry, journalism’s official court jester, knocking out not only columns at the Miami Herald but also annual collections and theme books on middle age, travel, parenting, etc.
Now that even Barry has quit his widely syndicated humor column, newspapers are dangerously bereft of wit, and a tradition of robust mockery has gone out of their pages. If fewer people are reading newspapers now, this may be one good reason; a certain flat respectability deadens their columns. The Onion (which began as a campus publication) tried to fill the gap, and was hilarious for a while but has run out of gas and seems stuck in a rut of graphic sex jokes, like the old Lampoon; its regional editions now carry authentic, and unfunny, local nightlife reviews, to entice advertisers.
Newspapers may be better and more responsible than they used to be, but much of the humor that once gave them pizzazz has vanished. The sardonic, wise guy spirit that inspired smart, sassy, fast-talking newspaper movies like “The Front Page” is gone. Humor columns seemed to fade away when newspapers decided to sober up and take themselves seriously--the down side of the Woodward and Bernstein syndrome. Reporters no longer wanted to write funny. They wanted to write for the ages, win big prizes and fight corruption - a noble newsroom tradition in itself, but what price glory? Laughter, that’s what.
It was newspapers that produced America’s legendary humorists - Mark Twain, of course, but also Peter Finley Dunne (“Mr. Dooley”), Irwin S. Cobb, Don Marquis (archie the cockroach), Corey Ford, George Ade, all of those frontier wits (Kin Hubbard, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings), many of the fabled Algonquin crowd and, leading the charge with his slashing Baltimore Sun column, “The Free Lance,” the great H.L. Mencken; Mencken wasn’t a humor columnist, exactly, but ruthlessly funny anyway.
Beyond newspapers, the nation’s magazines--and not just The New Yorker--gave writers like P.G. Wodehouse and H. Allen Smith a home, along with witty poets Ogden Nash and Richard Armour (light verse is another totally extinct form). Today even the vaunted New Yorker, the sparkling showcase for Thurber, Benchley, Dorothy Parker, E.B. White, Frank Sullivan, Alexander Woollcott, Wolcott Gibbs and generations of America’s wittiest writers--has fallen on somber times, rationing out wit in page-a-week spoonfuls in the “Shouts & Murmurs” department (to help the medicine go down).
Other magazines have adopted The New
Yorker’s page-per-issue policy for light pieces, like
The Back Page of Smithsonian, but magazines that once regularly
ran humor - Playboy, Esquire, Vanity Fair - seem to consider
it a waste of space. The Reader’s Digest, of all
places, still runs more humor than any other magazine including
The New Yorker, albeit in those little bite-size quips
and anecdotes. That little old lady in Dubuque, it turns out,
has a better sense of humor than Harold Ross figured.
The conventional wisdom is that the people who once wrote funny
stuff in newspapers and magazines are cranking it out for David
Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and the unending assemble
line of sitcoms that produce a zillion zingers a week (and volumes
of machine-produced guffaws), but very little humor. TV, among
its manifold sins, has also wrung much of the laughs out of us
- canned it, actually.
Radio--which is to say NPR--has provided a new wavelet of first-person humor - Garrison Keillor (who once published regularly in The New Yorker but hasn’t for many years), David Sedaris, Sarah Vowel, Tim Bedore, Ian Shoals, Harry Shearer. Audio humor seems to be alive and fairly well but prose humor in the press is ailing.
Even movies seem much less funny than ever, the comedies usually on a level with comedy-club toilet jokes. It’s as impossible to imagine a movie laced with wit, like “All About Eve,” as it is to find a humor piece on the New York Times op-ed page, reduced to Maureen Dowd’s political columns, full of wisecracks but little observational humor like Russell Baker’s and Molly Ivins’ wry ruminations. Wry rumination has had it.
Just as Woody Allen and Neil Simon, twin benchmarks if American humor, lost their touch a decade ago, wit and humor has lost its way, and lost its place, in America, a lot less civilized land now. Whither the successors to Russell Baker and Art Buchwald, not to mention the sublime but forgotten Bill Vaughn of the Kansas City Star and the (so far) irreplaceable Jean Kerr? It was Allen who once said that humorists never get to sit at the adult table--but once upon a time, in the 1930s, `40s, `50s, humorists were the adults. Even the cherished Allen now rarely publishes in The New Yorker.
Thinking it should be an ideal time to launch a humor column about middle age, as his fellow baby boomers approached 60, a writer I know sent out query letters, clip and sample columns to all the leading syndicates and to some 75 newspapers. He had been syndicated three times before (twice by Universal Press, once by the New York News-Chicago Tribune Syndicate), but nobody was interested this time. The depressing, unavoidable bottom line: the newspaper humor column is as dead as Miss Lonely Hearts. Just a glance at Mordecai Richler’s and Gene Shalit’s humor anthologies reveals what a vast vein of prose comic gold has simply, inexplicably, dried up.
My friend only heard back from one (count
`em!) newspaper, whose editor is a former colleague, and two
syndicates. The Santa Barbara News-Press editor explained
that he was under orders to keep everything local, echoing the
editor of The Pacific Sun, a Marin County weekly. Even
though their readers are now wired to the world beyond Main Street,
newspapers still pray that local news can keep them alive, even
though the handwriting is on the online wall.
Web sites like Slate, Salon and “The Borowitz
Report” are richly funny, even if it’s mainly political
humor, as if Washington was the only legitimate funny topic left.
A survey of online humorists turned up a few--Jim Mullen’s
“The Village Idiot” (he also writes a weekly “Hot
Sheet” column in Entertainment Weekly), “Off-Kilter”
by Roy Rivenburg, “Raising Kane” by Madeleine Begun
Kane, Matt Neuman in “The Drudge Report,” Robert Byron--unknown
names to me and, I think, to most people. None are as good as
thecolumnists.com’s Murry Frymer, onetime San Jose Mercury
News favorite.
Today’s op-ed pages, which were invented to give outside writers a forum, read as dreary and predictable as the editorial pages that op-ed columns were supposed to remedy and augment. Today’s op-ed columns are stacked with drowsy policy statements from anguished special interest groups or solicited from politically correct spokesmen. Forget the lowly humorist--freelancers of all kinds, without an ax to grind, have all but been shut out of the op-ed page. Newspapers badly need an op-op-ed page. An editor at the Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section told me that they don’t run any humor, “per se.” It’s just not fit to print.
Even at Dave Barry’s former paper, the Miami Herald, humor has been retired. The feature editor there told me that they don’t plan to replace him, are not re-running any of his old stuff and aren't interested in freelance humor pieces. Barry’s assistant said a few newspapers are running his old columns.
It’s startling to think that an entire journalistic (indeed literary) form--the comic essay --is nearly as extinct as the spotted owl. We’ve lost an entire generation of humorists, and, even more depressing, the editors running newspapers now grew up in a humor column-less era, so it’s not likely to get funnier anytime soon.
Editors at a few major newspaper syndicates told me that, what with the shrinking news hole and rising newsprint costs and bla-bla-bla, only comic strips and “service columns” are syndicate-worthy. Donald Trump could command a column, and probably Paris Hilton should she desire one, but if Art Buchwald sent in some sample columns now he would be told they were unmarketable. It’s much easier to start a gardening column. Hey, maybe a humor column on local garden pests is the way to go.
©2006 by Gerald Nachman. This column first posted April 3, 2006.
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