NOTE

THE LAST THING an editor of a book of humor stories wants to hear about any of his selections is “That’s not funny.” Accusations of poor taste, ridiculousness, broadness, childishness, absurdity . . . those are great. That means the reader laughed but has decided to feel bad for having laughed. Speaking of which, if “Uncle Remus” weren’t so funny, I would’ve chickened out and jettisoned it from this anthology for all of its complicated political and racial incorrectnesses. In the post-Civil War South, Joel Chandler Harris’s presentation of Uncle Remus was a complicated balancing act, which even Harris didn’t seem fully conscious of performing: he simultaneously confirmed and mocked stereotypes. A sense of humor, it’s clear, allows us to get closer to the truth of our common humanity than our public opinions do.

American humor is as distinctive as any culture’s, but I would be hard-pressed to describe what that distinctiveness is. Is it Ben Franklin’s satirical impersonations of various Philadelphia “types”? Is it Washington Irving’s post-revolutionary New York tall tales? Mark Twain is our most famous funny-man; he was so funny he could amuse us even as we expected amusement, which is a comedian’s most marvelous trick. He provided us with so many examples of humor, because everywhere he looked, all over the world (he was a real traveler), he was amazed and exasperated by the damned human race’s self-defeating lies and its verbal ingenuity in doing so. A recent commentator suggests that the distinctiveness of American humor is we are particularly good at making fun of ourselves, but that quality, it seems to me, is simply the universal basis of humor. Humor is humor because it shows us how mistaken-ridden we all are, how unconscious we are of our fallibilities, how blind we are to our own limitations, how serious we are and how ridiculous such posturing is. Humor tricks us into laughing with self-recognition.

All jesters face the ax: Be funny or die! says the Reader King. Yet the comic tone usually assures us that nobody, at least in the story, is going to die, or if there is death, we readers or listeners will not be wrenched by it. The characters will face many troubles and will, to our reassurance, overcome them or at least end up exactly where he or she started, ready to face another “situation.” Dorothy Parker’s unfortunate first-person narrator of “A Telephone Call,” for example, dramatizes and satirizes a particular anxiety better than any representation before or since: “You see, God, if You would just let him telephone me, I wouldn’t have to ask You anything more. I would be sweet to him, I would be gay, I would be just the way I used to be, and then he would love me again. And then I would never have to ask You for anything more. Don’t You see, God? So won’t You please let him telephone me? Won’t You please, please, please? Are You punishing me, God, because I’ve been bad? Are You angry with me because I did that? Oh, but, God, there are so many bad people—You could not be hard only to me. And it wasn’t very bad; it couldn’t have been bad. We didn’t hurt anybody, God. Things are only bad when they hurt people. We didn’t hurt one single soul; You know that. You know it wasn’t bad, don’t You, God? So won’t You let him telephone me now?” We know, just as the Eternal One knows, that in spite of improved technology, our lonely souls haven’t moved a single step since 1928, when Parker wrote that story. Why comic revelations about human nature seem to me reassuring, I don’t know.

Some of the characters in these stories became stars of recurring comedies—notably Lucretia P. Hale’s Peterkin family, John Kendrick Bangs’s Idiot, Marietta Holley’s Samantha Allen and Langston Hughes’s Jesse B. Simple. When readers asked for more, those writers discovered the versatility of their clowns. Simple’s creation gave Langston Hughes the fullest range Hughes ever had for his genius; he could step out and let loose on topics that were otherwise too infuriating for readers or too controversial, among them race and social injustice. Comedy gave opportunities to many of these writers to play around and regain the ability to surprise us. Comedy freed the authors and readers from arguments and proofs about the human condition and gave everyone instead a point of view of those edges where humans act consistently inconsistently—like humans.

One of the most poignant of characters is Howard Kaplan’s ever-super-conscious protagonist in “How to Fight with Your Wife,” which was the title of the 1990s newspaper column that chronicled in the finest psychological detail the social and marital dilemmas of a New Jersey husband. Kaplan’s hero makes James Thurber’s Walter Mitty seem comparatively slow-witted: “I threw a quick glance at Jean. She looked quite normal. It was I, rather, for just a second, who didn’t look himself. I was suddenly in the position of a man who comes to the realization he might have just accidentally poisoned his wife. I’m not often in this predicament. Was this the first time in fact? The alarm I could have predicted, but not the degree of furtiveness. The furtiveness was there in equal measure to the alarm. And then shame at my furtiveness: I wasn’t going to warn her. Either everything was absolutely fine—as I was sure it was—or something really was the matter, in which case it was too late. In either case, it seemed to me best to keep quiet.” How Kaplan got away with writing so well, so comically, for so long, in a modern periodical remains a happy mystery.

While I intended to include only independent short stories, I found I couldn’t draw the line at the excerpts I discovered in earlier anthologies. There was a hey-day of humor anthologies from the 1880s (when Twain edited a great grab-bag volume of American humorous skits, stories, and poems) to the 1910s, when dozens of collections gathered material from the many American magazines that published short fiction or from excerpts the anthologizers quietly made from novels. I myself have not made any excerpts but, less guiltily, have accepted earlier excerpts as faits accompli, among them the marvelous “Selecting the Faculty” by Robert Carlton (Baynard Rush Hall).

The span of time from Benjamin Franklin to Simon Rich is almost three hundred years, but it looks like a lively skip and a jump rather than a leap. Franklin, forever inventive in the sciences as well as in literature, never stopped writing skits and stories of bugs and aliens and underappreciated left hands, while Rich, the cleverest and funniest of contemporary writers, has taken turns through the consciousness of various characters, from ants to chickens to God, Socratically pondering life’s everyday problems. Franklin would’ve immediately grasped and enjoyed Rich’s faux-naïve fancies.

I have arranged the stories chronologically, by date of original publication, and at the end of each story have credited the source. The stories and tales, I have trusted, create their own contexts, so I have noted only the skimpiest of background details about the authors or their works. I thank my friends Max Schott, Enid Stubin, and Jack Wolkenfeld for their suggestions of material.