[A few years
ago, I had a lot of fun writing an
April Fools series. Foolishly, I haven’t done so since, but this year have
decided I won’t get fooled again. So this week I’ll be highlighting and
AmericanStudying a series of funny figures and texts. Share your own funny
favorites in comments and I’ll add ‘em to the crowd-sourced weekend post—no
foolin’!]
On three unique ways
the talented humorist captured the human condition.
Any analysis of
James Thurber’s legacy has to start with “The
Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1939); not the almost entirely unrelated
films with Danny Kaye
(1947) and Ben Stiller
(2013), but the pitch-perfect New Yorker
short story that started it all. “Mitty” is very funny and well done, capturing
both the different genres and worlds of the fantasy sequences and the realities
of Walter’s life and marriage with equal humor and success. But I know of few
literary works that engage more thoughtfully or meaningfully with the question
of the role that fantasy—and works of art that produce it—plays in our internal
and external identities and lives, nor many that portray such questions ambiguously
enough that it’s equally possible to make the case that they render our
protagonist a fool or a hero, an escapist idiot or a man doing what he needs to
do to navigate his day and life. Thurber’s story could certainly be fairer to
Mrs. Mitty, but, as Thurber himself knew well, nobody’s perfect!
Thurber produced
many, many more stories, cartoons, and other works in the course of his long and
prolific career (most of them also first published in The New Yorker), but I would highlight a couple specific categories
of works through which he framed his central interests in identity and society
in particularly unique ways. First, there are the nearly 100 short “fables”
that he collected in Fables
for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940) and Further
Fables for Our Time (1956). The idea of adopting the Aesop’s fables
method and form for our modern society and culture seems perhaps obvious or
even clichéd, but I don’t know of any other author who has produced a similar body
of such modern fables, much less ones that are as successful (both at capturing
the classic Aesop’s vibe and at reflecting elements of 20th century
life) as Thurber’s. All of these elements are exemplified by the most famous
fable, “The Unicorn in
the Garden” (1939); although “Unicorn” employs human characters, whereas
Thurber’s other fables (like Aesop’s) use anthropomorphic animals, it nonetheless
offers a great starting point for exploring Thurber’s funny and pointed work in
the genre.
One of the few
longer (and non-New Yorker-based)
works in Thurber’s career was his 1939 stage play The Male Animal, co-written
with Thurber’s college
classmate Elliott Nugent; the play was a hit and was adapted as a
1942 film starring Henry
Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. Set on a college campus, the comic but
socially pointed play centers both on the rocky marriage of its protagonists
(further threatened by the return of a former football star/love interest of
the wife) and on the unexpected political controversy in which the husband (a
professor) finds himself when his plan to read Bartolomeo
Vanzetti’s sentencing statement to a class is discovered by the college’s
conservative administration. The play (and film) navigate these different
layers of identity—the personal and political, the romantic and professional—with
all the wit and observational clarity we would expect from Thurber, but adapted
very successfully to this new medium. For an author and artist of Thurber’s
talents, every stage of his career and work reveals just another level of his
comic, biting, and deeply human themes and effects.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time, and I’m dead serious here: Funny favorites you’d share for that weekend
post?
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