Customer Reviews

The Algonquin Wits: Bon Mots, Wisecracks, Epigrams and Gags

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I was hoping for something a little more substantial from the description of this book, which turned out to be a slim volume at best. I was searching for some compendium of the Algonquin wits, and this was I'm afraid, about it! It is not without some merit, however dissappointing the selections are (small snippets - more anecdotal than anything else - representing the range of most of the members of the Round Table). It does offer a decent over-view of the prime members of the club with some literary tastes of their various and varying works. The playwrights are not that well represented, but some of the lesser know news reporters are. An appetizer waiting for a delicious feast to be compiled someday.

If you are acquainted with the writings and personalities of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woolcott and other distinguished wits who lunched in the '30s and early '40s at their special table in New York's Algonquin Hotel, you will especially relish this small but golden collection of their sophisticated one-liners - mostly barbed put-downs. But even if those names are unfamiliar to you, I think you'll enjoy this book if you appreciate sophisticated repartee. Incidentally, one member of the select group was Harpo Marx, who never uttered a word while performing as the zaniest of the Marx Brothers. A couple of Harpo's sallies are included in this delightful compilation.

The Algonquin Wits: Bon Mots, Wisecracks, Epigrams and GagsI have had a copy of this book for many, may years and bought more for friends...We sit and read excerpts and howl...what a classic group of wits all of the table occupants were. Dorothy Parker was the best of all.

The Algonquin Wits, Robert Drennan, Ed.; The Citadel Press (1968)


If a vine stem is prematurely removed from a ripening tomato, the tomato will become tasteless & later, inedible. Robert Drennan, likewise, in his "The Algonquin Wits," inexplicably removed what was once brilliantly vibrant repartee from its life-sustaining contexts.

The bon mots of Adams, Benchley, Broun, Kaufman, Lardner, Parker & Woollcott are presented in a sterile, single-file order - with little or no preparatory information that would enable readers to know why some of these as-presented lifeless punchlines were, at the time, considered to be clever & funny.

Some classic lines still stand alone imperturbably, successfully. But others, as presented, cannot.

For example, a suitable preface to Robert Benchley's sardonic "Lindbergh telegram" entry -

"Six days after Lindbergh's historic flight to LeBourget [sic; a French airport], Benchley sent a telegram to...Charles Brackett in Paris: `Any tidings of Lindbergh? Left here week ago. Am worried.' "

- Would alert readers that the aviator's feat had been the ONLY thing that radio & print reporters & a hysterical public had been talking about non-stop for about one week (after Lindbergh had landed in Paris in 1927, thus completing the first trans-Atlantic solo flight).

Drennan also didn't bother to quick-prep readers that Dorothy Parker was QUOTING author E.B. White's punch line assigned to a famous New Yorker cartoon, in which a small child at the dinner table knows that his parents are trying to hoodwink him into eating his vegetables & defiantly says just that:

"As a writer of book reviews, Parker experienced many tedious moments, but her most difficult times came when [she was] forced to write reviews of novels of `sensational' appeal.' On this occupational hazard, she once commented, `It's not just Lady Chatterley's Husbands. It's that after this week's course of reading, I'm good & through with the whole matter of sex. I say it's spinach, & I say the hell with it.' "

(Parker passed away in 1967. Had she lived, imagine her reaction to the equally revolting "Little Gloria, Happy At Last" - the 1980 best-selling sob-story/soap-opera biography of Gloria Vanderbilt, by Boo Hoo Goldsmith.)

If you're going to quote this sort of complicated fare, do it adroitly. This flawless setup is from Marion Meade's 1987 biography of Dorothy Parker:

"In years to come, efforts were made to resurrect what...had taken place that day...who had said what & to whom, but by then, nobody remembered much [of a meeting of the Round Table regulars at the Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s].

"The only certainty was that [theater critic & fey Broadway celebrity] Aleck Woollcott had held center stage recounting his wartime adventures at length & that the others were good-natured about allowing him to spout off. All his stories began with "When I was in the theater of war..." & finally, Arthur Samuels cut him short.

" `Aleck, if you were ever in the theater of war, it was in the last-row seat nearest the exit.' "

****

Drennan was also oblivious to the obvious in that much of what he had harvested had already rotted on the vine.

Comedy & humor & satire - each lives a notoriously ephemeral existence, & only a slight percentage of what once provided entertainment survives to amuse later generations (in this respect, the Drennan-selected lumberjack quips & cracks of Heywood Broun are especially wilted).

*****

AW may have merely been a work of vanity or mundane commerce (on which two magnificent Al Hirschfeld illustrations of the Round Table members & the finest high-gloss, quality paper was [were?] wasted) - possibly created for the benefit of the then-Algonquin owner, Ben Bodne.

Or was this a legitimate attempt to equate the Algonquin wits of the 1920s with those in Bodne's dining room in 1968?

"The Round Table itself...has endured...the famed luncheon spot continues to attract the urbane & sophisticated"

If so, pointing to the regular presence of the lunching "publisher & joke-master Bennett Cerf" as proof that the "urbane & sophisticated" still dine on 44th Street is an oddly preposterous tactic.

Cerf's self-conscious & awkward stabs at humor during his stint as a self-log rolling guest of the TV show "What's My Line," instead, cemented his legacy as an unintentional straight man - the 2nd Coming of Harold Ross - providing a can't-miss foil for the civil yet stinging tongue of former journalist & host, John Daly.

*****

Buying the hardcover book? Go ahead. But be forewarned that that will leave you with:

Two inside-cover reproductions of that wonderful Hirschfeld illustration of Parker & Pals;

A non-fact checked introduction - James Thurber & E.B. White were not "later humorists" on The New Yorker magazine staff; they were discovered & published almost immediately after the magazine was launched - that also ineptly characterizes Benchley's deadly serious reaction to his first taste of speakeasy booze ("This place ought to be closed by law!") as "self-deprecating";

Some timeless, excellent quips (that can also be found in many other, more worthy publications);

An extensive & useful bibliography (an extraordinary number of the titles listed are today, decades after their respective publications, available via Amazon);

And not much else.

Wonderful reading. I would have liked more about the founding of the circle, but it was a worthy and delightful read.

For those who enjoy the classic wit of the 30s and 40s this is a truly fun read. It's a shame we don't seem to have any folks with the intellect and pithy observations of our society we once had. I highly recommend this book as throwback to those times.