A Mormon Joke

Inevitably, when a story is set in Utah, you get the obligatory Mormon Joke. Here’s Bill Nye’s, from an otherwise lackluster “Twombley’s Tale”:

She was an emigrant, about seventeen years of age, and, though she had been in Salt Lake City an hour and a half, she was still unmarried.

Hee hee. Funny and original. Mormon. Marriage. Marriage at a young age. Hi-la-ri-ous.

Not that I don't mind reading this kind of japery. When it's well-done, I don't mind an entire book that pokes fun of my religion, because, frankly, in some ways it deserves to be made fun of.

So let us move on to “The Stars,” which is only slightly better.

There’s this:

In 1866, there appeared suddenly in the northern crown a star of about the third magnitude and worth at least $250. It was generally conceded by astronomers that this was a brand new star that had never been used, but upon consulting Argelander’s star catalogue and price list it was found that this was not a new star at all, but an old, faded, star of the ninth magnitude, with the front breadths turned wrong side out and trimmed with moonlight along the seams.

And that’s about it. Next, please.

Ogden Nash and CS Lewis: Spare Bedroom Readers

Whenever I think of Ogden Nash, I immediately think of an anecdote told by CS Lewis. The anecdote has nothing to do with the most-recognized practitioner of light verse in the United States, but, rather, how many people treat his books. Here’s the bit:

[The Screwtape Letters] is even, as I have noticed with a chastened smile, he sort that gravitates towards spare bedrooms, there to live of life of undisturbed tranquility in company with "The Road Mender," "John Inglesant," and "The Life of the Bee." Sometimes it is even bought for even more humiliating reasons. A lady whom I knew discovered that the pretty little brobationer who filled her hot water bottle in the hospital had read Screwtape. She also discovered why.

"You see," said the girl, "we were warned that at interviews, after the real, technical questions are over, matrons and people sometimes ask about your general interests. The best thing is to say you've read something. So they gave us a list of about ten books that usually go down pretty well and said we ought to read at least one of them."

"And you chose Screwtape?"

"Well, of course; it was the shortest."

I’ve read a lot of Ogden Nash, as I was first drawn to his writing by his poem about Isabel, which appeared in one of those nameless readers you encounter in American elementary schools:

Isabel met an enormous bear,
Isabel, Isabel, didn't care;
The bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous,
The bear's big mouth was cruel and cavernous.
The bear said, Isabel, glad to meet you,
How do, Isabel, now I'll eat you!
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry.
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up,
Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up.
Once in a night as black as pitch
Isabel met a wicked old witch.
the witch's face was cross and wrinkled,
The witch's gums with teeth were sprinkled.
Ho, ho, Isabel! the old witch crowed,
I'll turn you into an ugly toad!
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry,
Isabel didn't scream or scurry,
She showed no rage and she showed no rancor,
But she turned the witch into milk and drank her.
Isabel met a hideous giant,
Isabel continued self reliant.
The giant was hairy, the giant was horrid,
He had one eye in the middle of his forehead.
Good morning, Isabel, the giant said,
I'll grind your bones to make my bread.
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry,
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She nibbled the zwieback that she always fed off,
And when it was gone, she cut the giant's head off.
Isabel met a troublesome doctor,
He punched and he poked till he really shocked her.
The doctor's talk was of coughs and chills
And the doctor's satchel bulged with pills.
The doctor said unto Isabel,
Swallow this, it will make you well.
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry,
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She took those pills from the pill concocter,
And Isabel calmly cured the doctor.

Most people probably know a poem or two by Nash – the shorter ones – or confuse Nash with Richard Armour or any other number of nonsense poets – or vice versa. But Nash, I think, is one of those authors whose books, like Lewis’ are relegated to spare rooms and are kept around because they’re thin and easy to read.

Not so for me.

Especially because when he reads his poetry, he doesn’t put on that “poet’s voice” that has pretty much killed live poetry readings for me.

Untermeyer includes Nash’s “Common Cold” as one of three comic poems from the man. It’s okay.

I’ll admit I like this one a heck of a lot more: The Strange Case of Mr. Donnybrook's Boredom.

Once upon a time there was a man named Mr. Donnybrook.

He was married to a woman named Mrs. Donnybrook.

Mr. and Mrs. Donnybrook dearly loved to be bored.

Sometimes they were bored at the ballet, other times at the cinema.

They were bored riding elephants in India and elevators in the Empire State Building.

They were bored in speakeasies during Prohibition and in cocktail lounges after Repeal.

They were bored by Grand Dukes and Garbagement, debutantes and demimondaines, opera singers and Onassises.

They scoured the Five Continents and the Seven Seas in their mad pursuit of boredom.

This went on for years and years.

One day, Mr. Donnybrook turned to Mrs. Donnybrook,

My dear, he said, we have reached the end of our rope.

We have exhausted every yawn.

The world holds nothing more to jade our titillated palates.

Well, said Mrs. Donnybrook, we might try insomnia.

So they tried insomnia.

About two o'clock the next moring Mr. Donnybrook said, My, insomnia is certainly quite boring, isn't it?

Mrs. Donnybrook said it certainly was, wasn't it?

Mr. Donnybrook said it certainly was.

Pretty soon he began to count sheep.

Mrs. Donnybrook began to count sheep, too.

After a while, Mr. Donnybrook said, Hey, you're counting my sheep!

Stop counting my sheep, said Mr. Donnybrook.

Why, the very idea, said Mrs. Donnybrook.

I guess I know my sheep, don't I?

How? Said Mr. Donnybrook.

They're cattle, said Mrs. Donnybrook.

They're cattle, and longhorns at that.

Furthermore, said Mrs. Donnybrook, us cattle ranchers is shore tired o' you sheepmen plumb ruinin' our water.

I give yuh fair warnin', said Mrs. Donnybrook, yuh better git them wooly Gila monsters o' yourn back across the Rio Grande afore mornin' or I'm a-goin' to string yhuh up on the nearest cottonwood.

Carramba! Sneered Mrs. Donnybrook. Thees ees free range, no?

No, said Mrs. Donnybrook, not for sheepmen.

She strung him up on the nearest cottonwood.

Mr. Donnybrook had never been so bored in his life.

Another Big Hitter: Ogden Nash

Photo used under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

When you look like this and can rock a name like Ogden Nash, you know you're going to go places. And oh, the places Ogden Nash takes us.

Of all the short light verse bits he's written, this is my favorite:

A Word to Husbands

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.

Wiser words have never been spoken. More wise words from Mr. Nash a little later this week.

Poking at You Constantly

He pokes inside the reader’s mind, like this:

The reader of today, soaked in the Freudian sewage for so many years, will assume at once, I suppose, that Hoggie must have been a Lothario, and his headquarters a seraglio. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He was actually almost a Trappist in his glandular life, and his hormones never gave him any visible trouble until much later on, as I shall show in due course.

He pokes them in the eye, like that:

Hoggie would catch infant rats in a trap, pull their teeth with a pair of pliers, and then throw them into a barrel with a couple of his [canine] pupils. As the latter gained in strength and technique, he would test them with rats of gradually larger growth, retaining at first one tooth each, then two, and then four or five, and finally a whole set, upper and lower. Now and then a freshman was badly mauled in these exercises, but Hoggie did not despair, for he knew that any sort of educational process was bound to be painful, and he preferred the hard way for dogs as for men.

And then, H.L. Mencken, in his piece “Downfall of a Revolutionary,” describes the irascible Hoggie Unglebower, horse doctor, dog trainer, cat killer, sleeper of the stables and object of admiration of every boy in the neighborhood above the age of seven, as succumbing to the same thing that got Alfie Dolittle – except for the money thing. Hoggie, dressed in a beribboned straw hat, shaved within an inch of his life and smelling of Jockey Club scent, had fallen in love:

The ancient psychosis that had floored and made a mock of Marc Antony, Dante and Goethe – but not Shakespeare, Napoleon Bonaparte, or George Washington – had now fetched him, too. Some inconsiderable and probably pie-faced slip of a girl, name unknown, had collared him, tamed him, and made of him the dreadful popinjay that I had seen. The rest of the pathetic story follows classical lines, and is soon told. Hoggie disappeared from his stable, and was reported to be occupying a bedroom in the Unglebower family home, and actually eating at table. In a little while he vanished altogether, and reports came in that he was married to the lady, living in far Northwest Baltimore, and at work as a horse-car driver. That was the last I ever heard of him.

So now I’ve read something of H.L. Mencken’s. Probably one of his tamer bits; with a few tweaks this could easily have fit into a Patrick F. McManus collection. Giving me the feeling that maybe I’m not missing much. But I can’t judge by two simple pieces. I’ll have to read more.

I’m impressed by his grasp of vocabulary and history, however. To me, that’s always one of the hallmarks of a good writer.

An Embarrassment . . .

What follows is probably one of the most embarrassing intellectual confessions I’ve had to make:

I’ve never knowingly read anything by H.L. Mencken.

In fact, probably about the only thing I know about Mencken is the story of the Bathtub Hoax.

Mencken filled the story with nonsense, such as:

The noise of the controversy soon reached other cities, and in more than one place medical opposition reached such strength that it was reflected in legislation. Late in 1843, for example, the Philadelphia Common Council considered an ordinance prohibiting bathing between November 1 and March 15, and it failed of passage by but two votes. During the same year the legislature of Virginia laid a tax of $30 a year on all bathtubs that might be set up, and in Hartford, Providence, Charleston and Wilmington (Del.) special and very heavy water rates were levied upon those who had them. Boston, very early in 1845, made bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the ordinance was never enforced and in 1862 it was repealed.
And it was believed. And in some corners, it is still quoted as fact.

But that’s a pittance compared to Mencken’s literary legacy, to which Louis Untermeyer and the Treasury of Laughter will give me a preliminary introduction. For that, I am grateful.

Embarrassed by A Sock

I’ve never much been embarrassed by socks. Underwear, yes, that’s sometimes embarrassing – like the time in elementary school I reached into the pocket of my freshly-laundered jacket and found a pair of my brother’s underwear – also freshly laundered – inside. Or the time my aunt went shopping with a pair of panties statically stuck to the back of her coat.

Ruth McKenney, however, was once embarrassed by a sock, as she recounts in the humorous essay “The Sock Hunt.”

The story in brief: She decides, against all opposition and a highly patriarchal society in Columbus, Ohio, to infiltrate the hotel where Randolph Churchill, son of famed English Prime Minister Winston Churchill, was staying prior to delivering a talk on “Fate of an Empire” to a men’s group in Columbus. (Gratefully, we’ll get to hear from another of Columbus’ humorous writers, the inimitable James Thurber, shortly.)

She succeeds in getting an interview. They get chummy, and, as they say on the Internets, hilarity ensued:

“I say,” he said, “how about a spot of food, what?” He really talked just like that.

“OK,” I said. “Let me order, though. They can’t understand you over the phone. You talk so funny.”

Mr. Churchill glowered. He said I was the one who had a peculiar accent.

“You talk through your nose,” he said, with truth, “and you pronounce all your ‘r’s. They aren’t supposed to be pronounced.”

“That’s what you think,” I said, feeling hilarious. “Old Mushmouth.”

For some reason, Mr. Churchill thought that was very funny. “’Mushmouth’!” he shouted joyously, amid peals of real upper-class English laughter, very high-pitched, like a whinny. “’Mushmouth’! Deah me, I must remembaw that.”

That’s only the start of the hijinks. All culminates with both Churchill and McKenney looking for his one missing black dress sock, which he must wear during the luncheon speech. It is found, of course, by one of Columbus’ leading citizens, come to the hotel room with others to seek Mr. Churchill, catching Churchill and the young, earnest journalist crawling on the floor beneath the bed looking for the offending bit of frippery. Kenney concludes her essay thus:

But even the sweet rewards of college fame and my colleagues’ envy did not erase the memory of that hideous moment when I was caught, red-handed, looking for Mr. Churchill’s sock. It is comparatively easy to recover from honest sorrows, but I wake up in the dead of night at least twice a year and my heart fills with agony, remembering that unspeakable moment when, like a rising moon, my face slowly appeared from behind Mr. Churchill’s bed, to confound the three leading citizens of Columbus, Ohio.

Life can hold no further terrors for me.

Ah, the classic, classy anecdote. Not even Dobby's sock can beat this one.

Who Wrote This?

As much as I like Ogden Nash, he gets entirely too much credit for most of the nonsense verse written in the first half of the 20th century.

Ask a group who wrote this:

Shake and shake
the catsup bottle
first none’ll come
and then a lot’ll.

You’ll most likely hear “Ogden Nash.” Not so. That’s Richard Armour.

Then there’s this brief chuckler, also always erroneously attributed to Nash:

Epitaph to a Waiter

By and by
God caught his eye.

This one is written by David McCord, who has with other poets fallen into that Ogden Nash-shaped hole that is nonsense poetry in the United States. (I don’t say this to detract from Mr. Nash, whose poems I enjoy; it’s merely a fact of life that any nonsense verse written in the first half of the 20th century is attributed to him, whether he like it or not.)

Mr. McCord appears to have but one fan on YouTube, a rather squeaky-voiced, over t-shirtted tot reciting another of his poems.

Other than that, he appears to be the Rodney Dangerfield of nonsense poetry.