Laughing Matter

By Stefan Kanfer

THE BEST OF MODERN HUMOR

Edited by Mordecai Richler

Knopf; 400 pages; $17.95

Dying is easy," said Actor Edmund Gwenn at the end of his life. "Comedy is difficult." Perhaps that is why so many writers shun the genre. But there is a more salient reason. As Woody Allen sadly observes, "When you do comedy, you are not sitting at the grownups' table."

In this rich compendium, Novelist Mordecai Richler attempts to lift humorists out of the high chair and onto the Louis Quinze. He ransacks old collections and ranges through the century, from Stephen Leacock to Fran Lebowitz. Anything that smacks of adolescence is jettisoned: "You will meet with no Dorothy Parker here... I found her comic stories brittle, short on substance." And nothing mild is allowed: to go through Robert Benchley's work is "to discover a good many of his sketches astonishingly bland, disarmingly gentle." The 65 pieces that pass Richler's scrutiny are trenchant, acrimonious and sharp. Most of them are also funny. But they are no more mature than the Falstaff put down by Prince Hal: "How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!"

Take the first entry, Leacock's Gertrude the Governess: "It was a wild and stormy night on the West Coast of Scotland. This, however, is immaterial to the present story, as the scene is not laid in the West of Scotland." That kind of screwball is still pitched effectively by Monty Python, but it is not a sign of seniority. Virginia Woolf believed that Ring Lardner had "talents of a remarkable order." And so he had. But the episode from You Know Me Al leans hard on misspelling and false naivete, favorite devices of the novice: "Florrie thinks she has got to have a new dress though she has got two changes of cloths now and I don't know what she can do with another one."

The best of The Best of Modern Humor starts in the '40s, when S.J. Perelman was at the pique of his powers. In Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer he skewers Raymond Chandler: "I stared at her ears, liking the way they were joined to her head. There was something complete about them; you knew they were there for keeps. When you're a private eye, you want things to stay put." Later, in Yma Dream, Thomas Meehan offers a Carrollian nightmare in which the Misses Chaplin, Sumac, Gardner, Gabor, et al., and the Messrs. Eban, Ehrenburg, Betti, etc., are introduced to Miss Hagen, the actress: "Uta, Yma; Uta, Ava; Uta, Oona; Uta, Ona; Uta, Ida; Uta, Ugo; Uta, Abba; Uta, Ilya; Uta, Ira; Uta, Aga; Uta, Eva."

In Richler's amusement park, the contributors often find themselves in a hall of mirrors. Southerner Roy Blount Jr. indignantly recalls that "one afternoon this African got up in my favorite class, Difficult Fiction, and denounced William Faulkner for his treatment of 'non-Western people.' " Peter De Vries weighs in with a brilliant Yoknapatawpha parody, then Kenneth Tynan lampoons Faulkner in his spoonbread rendition of Our Town: "Well, folks, reckon that's about it. End of another day in the city of Jefferson, Mississippi ... Couple of people got raped, couple more got their teeth kicked in, but way up there those faraway old stars are still doing their old cosmic crisscross, and there ain't a thing we can do about it."

British Novelist John Mortimer remembers a friend easily intimidated by girls' bodies. After a sexual initiation, Mortimer inquires, " 'How on earth did you manage?' 'Manage?' 'About the breasts, of course.' 'Perfectly all right.' Oliver gave a smile of satisfied achievement. 'You hardly notice them at all.' " But Nora Ephron's A Few Words About Breasts notices nothing but: "What can I tell you? If I had had them, I would have been a completely different person."

The witless complain that humor is impossible to write in an age when headlines are more absurd than the products of imagination. Richler's contemporary entries offer hilarious refutation. Excerpts from Stanley Elkin's The Dick Gibson Show and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint belong on the shelf with Rabelais and Swift. Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode stands as a classic. In it, a professor of humanities is propelled backward in time to the arms of Madame Bovary and the pages of a remedial Spanish textbook: "He was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener ('to have')--a large and hairy irregular verb--raced after him on its spindly legs."

To be sure, there are large and hairy losers in this chrestomathy. Truman Capote's A Day's Work is a smirk posing as an empathic look at a cleaning lady; Marshall Brickman's pastiche The Analytic Napkin is road company Woody Allen; Dan Greenburg's How to Be a Jewish Mother has aged so rapidly that it makes the paper beneath it look brown. But almost everything else functions well in Richler's idiosyncratic, exuberant and welcome volume. What does not work is a steady insistence that humorists are a devalued species. In fact they enjoy unique privileges: they can mock the powerful, conceal anguish with a joke and enjoy an afterlife in the pages of anthologies. Small wonder that no one takes their complaint seriously. They themselves have made it laughable.

--By Stefan Kanfer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.