Especially for a generation that likes to hear that everything is either awesome or lame ( or other perjoratives I do not normally hear)...and in a world where people are not inclined to laugh at themselves any more.
When did the big cultural shift come, when verbal cleverness became a thing of the past?
You could look at someone like Woody Allen as being typical, he started up doing stand up and often writing very funny pieces for the New Yorker later ( he did one send-up on Jewish folk wisdom and another more recent one about Bernard Madoff that were pretty funny)...
But everyone knows Allen wanted to be like his idol, Ingemar Bergman, for whom life was no joke at all...
Saturday Night Live gets most of its humor from weird situational comedy (which is valid I guess) and sort of typical one-liner comic patter ( such as Seth Myers doing the news round up)--but very few people ever say anything that is very memorable.
Since I mentioned the Simpsons before, I guess that it has had more really funny lines and retorts and asides than most shows ( I have also been greatly amused by some of the wit in "Family Guy" although I never have watched that show very much).
Anyway, when the media world was much smaller, NYC was famous for its Algonquin Round Table humorists who were often very witty indeed ( especially Dorothy Parker).
This article from Wikipedia is sort of dry but I hope it informs you of a period in New York when people really valued incisive humor in their lives. Of course, during its heyday not everyone was a fan of the Round Table, as you will also find...(for instance , H.L. Mencken thought they were actually pretty tacky, even though they admired him a lot. But some curmudgeon like Mencken was not a great "laugher" anyway).
Algonquin Round Table
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Daily association with each other, both at the luncheons and outside of them, inspired members of the Circle to collaborate creatively. The entire group worked together successfully only once, however, to create a revue called No Sirree! which helped launch a Hollywood career for Round Tabler Robert Benchley.
In its ten years of association, the Round Table and a number of its members acquired national reputations, both for their contributions to literature and for their sparkling wit. Although some of their contemporaries, and later in life even some of its members, disparaged the group, its reputation has endured long after its dissolution.
Contents
Origin
The group that would become the Round Table began meeting in June 1919 as the result of a practical joke carried out by theatrical press agent John Peter Toohey. Toohey, annoyed at New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott for refusing to plug one of Toohey's clients in his column, organized a luncheon supposedly to welcome Woollcott back from World War I, where he had been a correspondent for Stars and Stripes. Instead Toohey used the occasion to poke fun at Woollcott on a number of fronts. Woollcott's enjoyment of the joke and the success of the event prompted Toohey to suggest that the group in attendance meet at the Algonquin each day for lunch.[1]The group first gathered in the Algonquin's Pergola Room (now called The Oak Room) at a long rectangular table. As they increased in number, Algonquin manager Frank Case moved them to the Rose Room and a round table.[2] Initially the group called itself "The Board" and the luncheons "Board meetings". After being assigned a waiter named Luigi, the group re-christened itself "Luigi Board". Finally they became "The Vicious Circle" although "The Round Table" gained wide currency after cartoonist Edmund Duffy of the Brooklyn Eagle caricatured the group sitting at a round table and wearing armor.[3]
Membership
Charter members of the Round Table included:- Franklin Pierce Adams, columnist
- Robert Benchley, humorist and actor
- Heywood Broun, columnist and sportswriter (married to Ruth Hale)
- Marc Connelly, playwright
- Ruth Hale, freelance writer who worked for women's rights
- George S. Kaufman, playwright and director
- Dorothy Parker, critic, poet, short-story writer, and screenwriter
- Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor
- Robert E. Sherwood, author and playwright
- John Peter Toohey, publicist
- Alexander Woollcott, critic and journalist[4]
- Tallulah Bankhead, actress
- Joseph Cookman, journalist and drama critic (married to Mary Bass)
- Edna Ferber, author and playwright
- Margalo Gillmore, actress
- Jane Grant, journalist and feminist (married to Ross)
- Beatrice Kaufman, editor and playwright (married to George S. Kaufman)
- Margaret Leech, writer and historian
- Neysa McMein, magazine illustrator
- Harpo Marx, comedian and film star
- Alice Duer Miller, writer
- Donald Ogden Stewart, playwright and screenwriter
- Frank Sullivan, journalist and humorist
- Deems Taylor, composer
- Estelle Winwood, actress
- Peggy Wood, actress[5]
Activities
In addition to the daily luncheons, members of the Round Table worked and associated with each other almost constantly. The group was devoted to games, including cribbage and poker. The group had its own poker club, the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, which met at the hotel on Saturday nights. Regulars at the game included Kaufman, Adams, Broun, Ross and Woollcott, with non-Round Tablers Herbert Bayard Swope, silk merchant Paul Hyde Bonner, baking heir Raoul Fleischmann, actor Harpo Marx, and writer Ring Lardner sometimes sitting in.[6] The group also played charades (which they called simply "The Game") and the "I can give you a sentence" game, which spawned Dorothy Parker's memorable sentence using the word horticulture: "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."[7]Members often visited Neshobe Island, a private island co-owned by several "Algonks"—but governed by Aleck Woollcott as a "benevolent tyrant", as his biographer Samuel Hopkins Adams charitably put it[8]—located on several acres in the middle of Lake Bomoseen in Vermont.[9] There they would engage in their usual array of games including Wink murder, which they called simply "Murder", plus croquet.
A number of Round Tablers were inveterate practical jokers, constantly pulling pranks on one another. As time went on the jokes became ever more elaborate. Harold Ross and Jane Grant once spent weeks playing a particularly memorable joke on Woollcott involving a prized portrait of himself. They had several copies made, each slightly more askew than the last, and would periodically secretly swap them out and then later comment to Woollcott "What on earth is wrong with your portrait?" until Woollcott was beside himself. Eventually they returned the original portrait.[10]
No Sirree!
Given the literary and theatrical activities of the Round Table members, it was perhaps inevitable that they would write and stage their own revue. No Sirree!, staged for one night only in April 1922, was a take-off of a then-popular European touring revue called La Chauve-Souris, directed by Nikita Balieff.[11]No Sirree! had its genesis at the studio of Neysa McMein, which served as something of a salon for Round Tablers away from the Algonquin. Acts included: "Opening Chorus" featuring Woollcott, Toohey, Kaufman, Connelly, Adams and Benchley with violinist Jascha Heifetz providing offstage, off-key accompaniment; "He Who Gets Flapped", a musical number featuring the song "The Everlastin' Ingenue Blues" written by Dorothy Parker and performed by Robert Sherwood accompanied by "chorus girls" including Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Ruth Gillmore, Lenore Ulric and Mary Brandon; "Zowie, or the Curse of an Akins Heart"; "The Greasy Hag, an O'Neill Play in One Act" with Kaufman, Connelly and Woollcott; and "Mr. Whim Passes By—An A. A. Milne Play".[12]
The only item of note to emerge from No Sirree! was Robert Benchley's contribution, The Treasurer's Report. Benchley's disjointed parody so delighted those in attendance that Irving Berlin hired Benchley in 1923 to deliver the Report as part of Berlin's Music Box Revue for $500 a week.[13] In 1928, Report was later made into a short sound film in the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system by Fox Film Corporation.[14] The film kicked off a second career for Benchley in Hollywood.[15]
With the success of No Sirree! the Round Tablers hoped to duplicate it with an "official" Vicious Circle production open to the public with material performed by professional actors. Kaufman and Connelly funded the revue, named The Forty-niners.[16] The revue opened in November 1922 and was a failure, running for just 15 performances.[17]
Decline of the Round Table
As members of the Round Table moved into ventures outside New York City, inevitably the group drifted apart. By the early 1930s the Vicious Circle was broken. Edna Ferber said she realized it when she arrived at the Rose Room for lunch one day in 1932 and found the group's table occupied by a family from Kansas. Frank Case was asked what happened to the group. He shrugged and replied, "What became of the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street? These things do not last forever."[18] Some members of the group remained friends after its dissolution. Parker and Benchley in particular remained close up until his death in 1945, although her political leanings did strain their relationship.[19] Others, as the group itself would come to understand when it gathered following Woollcott's death in 1943, simply realized that they had nothing to say to one another.[20]Public response and legacy
Because a number of the members of the Round Table had regular newspaper columns, the activities and quips of various Round Table members were reported in the national press. This brought Round Tablers widely into the public consciousness as renowned wits.Not all of their contemporaries were fans of the group. Their critics accused them of logrolling, or exchanging favorable plugs of one another's works, and of rehearsing their witticisms in advance.[21] James Thurber was a detractor of the group, accusing them of being too consumed by their elaborate practical jokes. H. L. Mencken, who was much admired by many in the Circle, was also a critic, commenting to fellow writer Anita Loos that "their ideals were those of a vaudeville actor, one who is extremely 'in the know' and inordinately trashy".[22]
The group showed up in the 1923 best-seller Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton. She sarcastically described a group she called "the Sophisticates":
They met at the sign of the Indian Chief where the cleverest of
them—and those who were so excitedly sure of their cleverness that for
the moment they convinced others as well as themselves—foregathered
daily. There was a great deal of scintillating talk in this group of the
significant books and tendencies of the day....They appraised, debated,
rejected, finally placed the seal of their august approval upon a
favored few.[23]
These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days—Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway.
Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people
telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of
loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a
chance to spring them....There was no truth in anything they said. It
was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any
truth...[25]
The Algonquin Round Table, as well as the number of other literary and theatrical greats who lodged there, helped earn the Algonquin Hotel its status as a New York City Historic Landmark. The hotel was so designated in 1987.[26] In 1996 the hotel was designated a national literary landmark by the Friends of Libraries USA based on the contributions of "The Round Table Wits". The organization's bronze plaque is attached to the front of the hotel.[27] Although the Rose Room was removed from the Algonquin in a 1998 remodel, the hotel paid tribute to the group by commissioning and hanging the painting A Vicious Circle by Natalie Ascencios, depicting the Round Table, and also created a replica of the original table.[28] The hotel also occasionally stages an original musical production, The Talk of the Town, in the Oak Room. Its latest production started September 11, 2007, and ran through the end of the year.[29]
A film about the members, The Ten-Year Lunch (1987), won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.[30] The dramatic film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) recounted the Round Table from the perspective of Dorothy Parker.[31]
Portions of the 1981 film Rich and Famous were set in the Algonquin, and one of the film's characters, Liz Hamilton (played by Jacqueline Bisset), a writer, references the Round Table during the film.
In 1993, The Algonquin Round Table is featured in The Young Indiana Jones and the Scandal of 1920 where the titular character meet the group and attend at least two lunches.[32] Wonderful Nonsense - The Algonquin Round Table is a documentary produced for the DVD release of that film in 2008.[33]
In 2009, Robert Benchley's grandson, Nat Benchley, and co-editor Kevin C. Fitzpatrick published The Lost Algonquin Round Table, a collection of the early writings of the group.
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