Editor's Letter

"The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow."
--Mark Twain

When the Illinois Humanities Council staff selected humor as the topic for this newest issue of Detours last summer, it seemed a timely topic. Late night talk show hosts were regularly skewering George Bush, and for most Americans Britney Spears was the most appalling thing around.

Of course, after September 11th, our choice of topics felt naive and inappropriate. Even humor seemed a luxury -- a throwback to a much earlier time. A few short minutes on September 11th seemed to propel us eons away from the world we knew before. But as Mark Twain reminds us above, humor is not only a natural response to tragedy, but it often grows out of sorrow. However, anyone who saw David Letterman's show the week after the attacks will never forget how hard it was for him to go on at the personal request of Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Certainly, being funny has been difficult since the terrorist attacks.

With this in mind, we explained to our Detours contributors that their articles didn't need to be funny, but rather we asked them to explore humor as a genre or topic. The result is an issue that delves into a diversity of humor-related topics -- from Illinois humor to dark comedy to social satire. Cartoonist Nicole Hollander and playwright Rebecca Gilman offer some wonderfully personal reflections on how humor can respond to the shifting world views in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

The larger question for us, of course, is what role the humanities themselves can play in the wake of September 11. Bruce Cole, the newly appointed Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, explained it well in the Washington Post: "We [the NEH] are here because democracy does demand wisdom. Our democracy will be as good as our citizens. Our citizens will engage best when they know who we are, where they come from, what our institutions and freedoms are." This goal of engaging citizens in democracy is at the heart of many Illinois Humanities Council programs.

This year, the IHC has devoted one of our "True Learning, True Teaching" seminars for Illinois K-12 teachers to the study of Islam entitled, "Islam the Fundamentals", this seminar considered the historical context of Islam. In much the same way, the IHC's library discussion program, "Choices for the 21st Century: Defining Our Role in a Changing World," engages citizens and communities in open dialogue about issues such as conflict resolution, terrorism, and the global economy. In April 2002, high school students debated just these issues on the floor of the State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois at the culmination of a year-long program called "Capitol Forum on America's Future," a program that provides interactive curriculum units for high school social studies teachers and their students. This program is offered in partnership with the Illinois Secretary of State's Office.

We want to thank Ivan R. Dee for permission to excerpt materials from Bernard Sahlins' new book, Days and Nights at Second City. We also wish to thank Groucho Marx Productions and Robert Finkelstein for permission to reproduce our cover image, which first appeared as part of an exhibition mounted at the Spertus Museum Chicago entitled, "Let There be Laugher! Jewish Humor in America."

Phoebe Stein Davis
Senior Editor, Detours
Director of Public Affairs, Illinois Humanities Council

"If it plays in Peoria": A Short History of Humor in Illinois

James Krohe Jr.

There is no such thing as Illinois humor. This is not to say that Illinoisans don't have a sense of humor. But there is no style of humor that is uniquely Illinoisan, no body of jokes directed at the state per se, no tradition of performance that owes to, and conveys, the peculiar placeness of Illinois. In humor as in so much else, Illinois is two places, each with its own style of humor. There is what might be called Downstate Illinois humor--bucolic in origins and reference, most naturally expressed in parable told over the cracker barrel or the stove--and Chicago humor, whose natural idiom is the wisecrack delivered across a bar in a saloon.

No Illinoisan was more adept at Downstate humor than Abraham Lincoln. Humor was a crucial element in both the public and the private man; his law partner William Herndon reports reliably that Lincoln was known as a jokester and storyteller around central Illinois well before he was known as a lawyer or politician. He did not tell funny stories for the sake of fun but to make a point, and thus favored tales with what Herndon called "the necessary ingredients of mirth and moral."

Lincoln's skill with a story in the courtroom and the tavern and on the campaign trail, was unusual among his fellows only in degree. Regrettably, only a few of Lincoln's stories are in print. They could be ribald and rude, and no wonder, as the atmosphere at country inns and political rallies, even county courtrooms, was not unlike that of a comedy club today, complete with the drunken hecklers. The President's early biographers, out of concern for the President's reputation or their own, did not record such stories as they were recalled by his audiences. Accounts that do survive suggest that Lincoln's sense of humor was of his time and place--sly and self-deprecating, dry in tone and stoic in temperament. That voice found expression in Lincoln's response to a crowd after having been accused in debate by Stephen Douglas of being two-faced. "I leave it to my audience," he said. "If I had another face, do you think I'd wear this one?"

Happily that voice did not die with Lincoln. It enlivened the county histories written around the turn of the 20th century, for example, a generation after Lincoln. Typical is the Lee County history that chronicled the saga of the Rosbrook boys in the days before Progress had come to Lee County in the form of good roads. Local farmers, they'd spent three days scything hay, which they loaded onto a wagon for the trip into a nearby town, where they planned to sell it on the Fourth of July. Unfortunately, they get bogged down in a slough on the way, and are forced to unload the hay, pull out the now-lighter wagon, and reload their hay. By the time they got to town most potential buyers had left, and they got but 75 cents for their load. Our anonymous historian remarked that when the Rosbrooks started for home at 4 PM, "their conversation touched but lightly on patriotism. Indeed, as it is now remembered, they considered Washington's act in saving the country rather insignificant, and in regard to their locality, wholly unnecessary."

Downstate humor has its roots in the soil, and where Illinoisans remain close to the soil the humor survives. (A good thing too; a farmer getting less than two dollars a bushel for his corn had best be able to laugh.) The spring of 2000 lacked the warmth and the wetness that corn seeds need to sprout, which prompted one Downstate farmer to explain to a state crop statistician why he and his neighbors had gotten such an early start on their corn planting. It says on the bag to store in a cool, dry place, the farmer pointed out, so he put it in the ground.

That would scarcely qualify as a joke in Chicago, one suspects. But it is foolish to draw too firm a line between Chicago humor and Downstate humor. To the extent that early Chicago humor was largely Irish humor, and to the extent that the Irish were people not far from the soil, they brought a kindred sensibility to their experience of life in Illinois, however different that experience might have been from the state's farmers. Only the tricky rendering of the Irish accent in print would have kept Lincoln's pals at New Salem from getting the humor in this exchange (reported by Bridgeport's Finley Peter Dunne) when the defiant Mr. Donahue learned he had been bested by his wife and daughter over the buying of a piano.

"I'll be masther iv me own house."

"Ye will so," said Mr. Dooley. "But don't say it too loud; di' fam'ly may hear ye."

Illinois Humor
Illinois humor thus is merely humor in the Midwestern style set in Illinois or about Illinois. Illinois humor, like its weather or its cuisine, is indistinguishable from that of the Midwest of which it is so representative a part. This sort of jape could have appeared in any Midwest newspaper during the rationing days of WWII; this one appeared in the Arenzville Tattler:

Saw a sign in a small rester restur, I mean Cafe, the other day:

T-Bone ------- 30¢

(If you want meat on it, come in and dicker)

One hardly hears an "Illinois" joke that is not a farmer joke--or a redneck joke or a hillbilly joke or rube joke, or any of the ruder ethnic variants--with an Illinois license plate stuck on it. They ring true enough most of the time. But Illinois is changing, and the jokes don't always keep up. Here's one, from the World Wide Web: "You know you're from Illinois if your idea of a traffic jam is ten cars waiting to pass a tractor on the highway." In those great swaths of rural Illinois being undone by urban sprawl, you'd get a bigger laugh with this: "You know you're from Illinois if your idea of a traffic jam is a tractor waiting to pass ten cars on the highway."

Illinois jokes may be rare as palm trees in Pike County but there are plenty of jokes about things Illinoisan. There are Cubs jokes and Chicago jokes, for example, and a few that are both. ("The Chicago Cubs are like Rush Street--a lot of singles, but no action"--Joe Garagiola.) Both the city and the ball club have what the state as a whole lacks as a target for jests, namely a specific identity with traits peculiar to it.

Springfield has long been the butt of jokes, perhaps because the capital is a city to which state government types are exiled as a condition of their careers; their resentment at being taken away from the comforts of home gets expressed in dismissive humor. A veteran bureaucrat, for instance, advises that if you find you have but two weeks to live, spend it in Springfield -- "it'll seem like a lifetime." A popular T-shirt sold by a local bookshop bears a portrait of the late President with the legend, "They'd have to shoot me to get me back to Springfield." Springfield patriots have grown deaf to such insults, which they've been hearing for well over a century. In Paul Angle's history of early Springfield we find this story, which was a favorite of Lincoln's:

One day a meek-looking man applied to Thompson Campbell who, as Secretary of State, had custody of the State House, for permission to deliver a series of lectures in the Hall of the House of Representatives.

"May I ask," said Campbell, "what is to be the subject of your lectures?" "Certainly," was the solemn reply, "they are on the second coming of our Lord."

"It's no use," said Campbell, "if you will take my advice you will not waste your time in this city. It is my private opinion that if the Lord has been in Springfield once, he will not come the second time."

The tall tale and the boast figure perennially in Illinois humor, especially in the folklore of southern Illinois. Another southerner--Chicago alderman "Bathhouse John" Coughlin, who ruled the old First Ward south of the Loop--also mastered the idiom. Donald Tingley thought well enough of this anecdote to include it in his 1980 history, The Structuring of a State. The 1908 Democratic Party's national convention was held in Denver, where Coughlin had a summer house. According to the Tribune, tour guide Coughlin explained to his guests: Colorado is the most important geographical division of the known world outside of the first ward of Chicago.... While there is nothing to compare with the variety of climate experience between the torrid regions of the 22nd Street and the rarified heights that occupy the Municipal Voters League, still Colorado has some high altitudes that are picturesque in their own crude way. Such flights are now rare, alas. Town boosters have not lost their talent for extravagant praise, but the new boasts lack the old poetry.

Political Humor
Bathhouse John was hardly the only politician to use humor to beguile a crowd. One could argue that politicians were Illinois's first stand-up comics. "Big Bill" Thompson, Mayor of Chicago for three terms between 1915 and 1931, would have made a first-rate showman instead of a third-rate mayor; a history of the General Assembly based on the jokes that have been told by and about its members would be more fun than the usual histories, and not much less instructive. Many politicians have had wicked senses of humor but they prudently put most of their barbs off the record.

Politicians use humor the same ways non-elected Illinoisans do--to deflect humor directed at them, or to wound an enemy, or (as Lincoln did) to make a point. The last tradition is by now a bit threadbare, but occasionally an Illinoisan pol has sought to emulate Lincoln and not just praise him. Everett Dirksen, Pekin's gift to the U.S. Senate, is one. Lamenting the federal government's tendency to overspend, Dirksen made a remark that has been repeated thousands of times, sometimes accurately: "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money."

Too much humor in a politician is considered unbecoming, some voters confusing humor with frivolousness. The quips and scripted lines that brightened Adlai E. Stevenson's campaigns for governor and President were thought by some to betray a lack of seriousness. (The Chicago Tribune called him "Adlai, the Side Splitter.") Biographer Porter McKeever gives an example of the Stevenson style on the stump. "At one whistle-stop where an echo kept repeating back his words, he told the crowd, 'I think what I am saying is worth listening to, but it's certainly not worth listening to twice.'" At Notre Dame University, when a young mother, red-faced at futile efforts to quiet her crying baby, arose from one of the front rows to leave, he interrupted himself to say, "Please don't be embarrassed. I agree with you, if not with my opponent, that it is time for a change."

These days, Illinois politicians must worry about a failed joke being replayed a hundred times in the TV news, and so tend not to make any. Because of that, most of the better jokes from political leaders in recent years have been unintentional. The master of the inadvertent jest was Richard J. Daley, whose malapropisms are legend. (One example of many: "The policeman isn't there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder," uttered in response to the 1968 Democratic national convention riots.) Purists will complain that while this sort of remark is funny it isn't humor, and we have to agree.

Literary Humor
Stump humor is necessarily aimed fairly low, so as not to sail over the heads of voters (or reporters). Humor directed as the reading public can be pitched higher. Illinois has produced quite a number of literary humorists expert in every genre from the newspaper column to the satiric novel. Chicagoan Edward Tanner, the novelist who, as Patrick Dennis, gave the world Auntie Mame, has been called the Noel Coward of camp. We Called It Music, Eddie Condon's memoir of the early days of jazz in Chicago and other places, was not a humor book per se but it is wickedly funny. Condon was as famous for his wisecracks as he was for his guitar playing. Critics have ranked Walnut native Don Marquis as a humorist only a bit below Twain. His columns in New York City newspapers in the early decades of the 20th century featured several recurring characters that became household names in the 1920s and 1930s, most memorably archy the cockroach and mehitabel the cat. He was a humorist's humorist, a favorite of such masters as E.B. White.

Of the 35 writers enshrined on the frieze of the State Library in Springfield, however, only two are honest-to-goodness humorists--George Ade (born in 1866) and Finley Peter Dunne (born in 1867). (Lincoln's name is also on the frieze, but while he used humor, humor was not the point of his stories. Ring Lardner also is there, but while capable of writing some very funny stories, he too was not a humorist per se.) Indiana-born George Ade composed hundreds of vignettes of everyday Chicago in the 1890s in such newspapers as the Morning News and Record. Colloquial in tone and mildly satiric, these tales featured the antics of ordinary people such as office worker Artie and shoeshineman Pink Marsh. These tales were collected and published in book form, as were a series of loose adaptations of Aesop's fables as told in the Midwestern slang of the day; all were hugely popular.

Chicago newspaperman Finley Peter Dunne wrote in the vernacular too, in his case the accented English of the Irish working class who frequented the fictional Bridgeport saloon of his literary alter ego, Mr. Dooley. Consistent with his calling, Dooley was a philosopher whose monologues constitute an unequalled body of social reportage and criticism and were collected in several books.

For all their differences, much unites Ade and Dunne. For one thing, both wrote about small towns. For another (as the Cambridge History of English and American Literature put it) Ade's humor "bears the same relation toward social things that Mr. Dooley's political vein bears toward national politics." The two authors took vernacular speech--the rural Midwest in Ade's case, Chicago Irish in the case of Dunne -- and gave it literary form. They thus served as translators of their people for a wider world, much the way comics who came out of the Yiddish clubs of the 1950s translated the world of the Catskills and the synagogue for white-bread Americans sitting at home watching TV.

Alas, these masters might as well have written on the walls of caves, so unlikely is it that modern readers will have run across their work. In 1947 an editor recalled one of the many humorous adages coined by Ade a generation previously and asked, "Who has not heard 'Early to bed and early to rise' and 'You'll meet very few important people?'" A half-century later, the answer is, hardly anyone. As for Dunne's work, the humor of these dispatches is, sadly, inaccessible to later generations that find standard English, much less dialect, to be an intolerable inconvenience while reading.

The originator of the Ade-ian humorous vignette may no longer be read, but versions of it reappear across Illinois. The form was recognizable in some of the urban fables of long-time Chicago columnist Mike Royko. In its more bucolic guise it persists in the work of local columnists, usually working for small-town weeklies, whose reports on local doings--humorous, vernacular, affectionate--are Ade-ian in everything except perhaps literary polish. One such is Ken Bradbury, a veteran teacher at Triopia High School in Concord, in rural Morgan County, who is the chronicler (under the name of Freida Maria Crump) of the imagined village of Coonridge, Illinois.

The George Ade of the upscale suburbs is Peter DeVries. Perhaps Illinois's pre-eminent modern literary humorist, DeVries was born in 1910 in Chicago. After odd jobbing during the Depression, DeVries ended up an editor at the famous Poetry magazine in 1938; after four years he ended up at the New Yorker, where he found fame. Before he died in 1993 he published some two dozen novels. One, Tunnel of Love (1954), earned him praise as "something of a national humorist laureate." DeVries in his prime was compared to Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, and Evelyn Waugh (the early, funny Waugh). Unusual for such funny works, he wrote his novels in a highly intellectual or at least mental style that relied on puns, goofy aphorisms, and word games. DeVries set some of his stories in his home state--the hero, more or less, of Consenting Adults is Ted Peachum of the fictional Pocock, Illinois--but the real setting for his stories was the treacherous landscape of the suburban mind. His persistent themes were the difficulties of marriage and of religion, which pose similar dilemmas to the faithful.

Cartoonists
The roster of Illinois humorists includes an impressive number of cartoonists. By "cartoonist" we do not mean editorial cartoonists, who use humor to make what are ultimately polemical points. Nor do we include the practitioners of the newer art of the comic novel. (Chicago has connections to two acknowledged masters of this new genre in the persons of Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes.) When we say "cartoonist," we mean the author of comic strips and drawings.

Chicago in the decades bracketing 1900 had as many newspapers as it has television stations today. Cartoonists flocked to the city the way pickpockets flock to state fairs. Frank Willard, born in 1893 and raised in Anna at the other end of Illinois, apprenticed at the old Chicago Herald in the pre-World War I years; Willard found fame in New York City with the "Moon Mullins" comic strip, which at its peak appeared in 250 newspapers read by 15 million people. H.T. Webster, the cartoonist-creator of Caspar Milquetoast, also spent his early years in Chicago before moving to New York City.

Cartoonist Edgar "Abe" Martin was the author of "Boots and Her Buddies", a popular newspaper strip in the early 1900s detailing the exploits of a popular coed and her classmates in a fictional college town based closely on Monmouth, Illinois and Monmouth College, Martin's alma mater. Another strip of that ilk that is more familiar to today's readers is "Blondie," a strip created by Chicago-born Murat Bernard "Chic" Young. Young grew up in St. Louis; after graduating from high school, he returned to his native Chicago where he attended night classes at the Art Institute before leaving in 1921 for Cleveland and then New York to do strips for the Newspaper Enterprises Association (NEA). One of them, "Blondie" (1930) became perhaps the most successful comic strip of all time. (When the U.S. Postal Service wanted a cartoon character to grace a new postage stamp commemorating the 1995 centennial of the American newspaper comic strip, it chose "Blondie.") And while he gave up drawing early in his career, Walt Disney deserves mention for his innovations in the art form of the animated cartoon. Disney was born in Chicago, and after a youth in Kansas came back to study at McKinley High School and (at night) at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.

Helen E. Hokinson graduated from Mendota High School in 1913, and went on to publish some 1,700 cartoons in the New Yorker, usually featuring befuddled dowager-types. (Typical Hokinson woman at a club meeting: "I just want to say that I'm perfectly willing to serve as treasurer, provided every penny doesn't have to come out exactly even.") Another notable magazine cartoonist was E. Simms Campbell, the first African-American cartoonist and illustrator to receive national recognition in mainstream publications. St. Louisan Campbell moved to Chicago as a teenager when his mother died. Like many black artists in the city, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the few art schools in the U.S. that admitted black students. He left Chicago, eventually landing in New York City, where he was hired by Esquire, where his first byline appeared in 1933. In addition to illustrations--he created the magazine's mascot, among other assignments--he did cartoons. (Campbell's all-white harems are examples of what one critic called "working in whiteface.") Upon leaving Esquire, he became the first black cartoonist to be nationally syndicated.

Among contemporary humorists who draw, several Illinois artists stand out. Chicago Tribune cartoonist Jeff MacNelly died in 2000 at 53. Best known as an editorial cartoonist--he won the Pulitzer Prize for work in that genre in 1972, 1978, and 1985--MacNelly also illustrated humorist Dave Barry's syndicated column and wrote the daily comic " Shoe" beginning in 1977; the latter made working at a newspaper seem much funnier than it is, which is one reason why it appeared in more than 1,000 newspapers.

Among the more highly regarded among mainstream practitioners is Pat Brady, who lives in Sycamore. Several times nominated as "Cartoonist of the Year" by the National Cartoonists Society, Brady is the author of the syndicated strip "Rose is Rose," a sort of Peanuts for the 1990s which chronicles the exploits of the Gumbo family in more than 600 newspapers. Nicole Hollander is the author of "Sylvia," which in 1979 introduced the world to the bathtub philosopher who first pointed out that a world without men would feature "No crime and lots of happy, fat women." Hollander is one of the still-few women whose work graces the newspaper comic pages. She grew up in Chicago, returning there to live after studying art at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. More than a dozen collections of "Sylvia" strips have been published, along with dolls and calendars and, in 1991, a musical play, Sylvia's Real Good Advice, which Hollander co-wrote.

Brady and Hollander are unusual in that they maintain national careers from the Chicago area, unlike so many of their predecessors at the drawing table, who trained or apprenticed in Chicago but had to move to New York to make their livings. Another contemporary cartoonist who stayed put is Lynda Barry, author of the "Ernie Pook" comic strip and the novel-turned-play The Good Times Are Killing Me. Barry was born in a small Wisconsin town. She got her start in Chicago in the late 1970s when the Chicago Reader began picking up her cartoons. Her audience is now national, made up of fans of "alternative" cartooning that is not always about jokes, indeed often isn't meant to be funny.

Comics and Comedians: The Radio Era
Illinois nurtured the man who was, arguably, the Lincoln of comedy--radio and TV star Jack Benny. Benny was an innovator of comedy formats; The Jack Benny Program on radio--sketch comedy with a repertory company that poked fun at pop culture--was the forerunner of "Saturday Night Live" in everything but manners. Unlike the Illinois comics of later generations, Benny did not write his own material; he was however a performer with brilliant timing and taste. It was Benny who elicited from Ed Wynn that essential distinction between a comedian "meaning a man [like Benny] who says things funny, as opposed to a comic, who says funny things."

Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky in Chicago in 1894 but grew up in Waukegan, where his father owned a saloon and later a dry-goods store. He began playing the violin for money at 15, in the pit orchestra of a local theater; his habit of skipping afternoon classes to make matinee curtains caused his school to expel him at 17. After a few years on the vaudeville circuit as a violinist, Benny discovered he could make people laugh--also in Illinois, as it happened, at the nearby Great Lakes Naval Training Station in 1918 where, as a Navy enlistee, he wowed 'em in a base revue.

To say that Jack Benny is Waukegan's favorite son is to say not nearly enough. Benny was perhaps the only reason the world ever heard of Waukegan; his hometown figured in a few of his radio shows, and he broadcast his show from there in 1939. In gratitude the town planted a Jack Benny elm beside the city hall, opened a Jack Benny Center for the Arts located on Jack Benny Drive in Bowen Park, and commissioned a statue of him for the restored Genesee Theatre downtown. Of all these gestures, the one that reportedly meant the most to Benny was naming a new junior high school for him in 1961. The schools' athletic teams are nicknamed the 39ers.

Chicago was the birthplace of another star of the 1930s and '40s--rather two stars, in the persons of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen (born Bergren) and his dummy companion Charlie McCarthy. Bergen was born in 1903 in Chicago, where his Swedish parents had a retail dairy; Charlie McCarthy had Chicago parentage too, having been modeled upon a tough Irish newsboy Bergen knew. Like many boys Bergen was fascinated by sleight-of-hand tricks and sleight-of-voice tricks alike; he was tutored in the latter by traveling ventriloquist Harry Lester. Bergen began to work his way part through college at Northwestern University, but learned more doing a magic/ventriloquism act at parties, and left school for vaudeville.

Greater Chicago in those days was rich ground for early performers in vaudeville. The Marx family, for example, moved to Chicago from New York in late 1909 or so, looking for a place they could subject new audiences to what had become tired routines. They lived at 4512 Grand Boulevard (now King Drive) and performed as the Four Nightingales and the Six Mascots before becoming what the world knows as the Marx Brothers. It was at Chicago's Windsor Theater, in 1914, that the group debuted one of their seminal early shows, and the filmed version of their touring show Animal Crackers, now a classic, had it national premiere in Chicago in 1930.

The world owes Peoria for James Edward Jordan and Marian (Driscoll) Jordan, the real-life husband-and-wife team who starred in that classic radio comedy series of the 1930s and '40s, Fibber McGee & Molly. "Fibber" was born on a farm five miles west of Peoria. In Peoria he attended St. Mark's Grade School and later the Spaulding Institute. A singer, he met his future Molly in Marian Driscoll while he was singing in the choir of St. John's Church. Peoria offered no future on the stage, so Jordan ventured to Chicago, where he secured his first stage job. Marian was a native Peorian who also was raised in the church. She was an avid performer of the sort that keep local amateur theatricals cast; she studied voice, violin and piano at Runnell's School of Music in Peoria.

The couple wed in Peoria, after which the Jordans made a stab at vaudeville and, more successfully, organized their own touring concert company which enabled them to see the inside of most of the "opera houses" and church churches in the Midwest. The Jordans faced a dreary professional future until they got their break in Chicago in 1925 on a song program, which led to a modest career as sketch comedians. Skilled voice actors, the pair found their perfect comic personae in Fibber McGee and Molly. The radio series that recounted their adventures debuted in 1935. It struck a chord with all the spiritual Peorians out there in radioland--of which there were a lot then as now; the show remained a radio staple in one form or another until 1959.

Another of Peoria's gifts to the fledgling radio business was Charles Correll, who was Andy in the popular Amos 'n' Andy radio series. Correll was born and raised in Peoria. A jack-of-all-building-trades during the day, Correll apprenticed as an entertainer at night and on weekends, performing in song and dance contests, local theatricals, and playing piano in movie houses before going on the road as a show producer, where he met partner Freeman Gosden. Their show (originally conceived as a comic strip adapted to broadcasting) originated on Chicago's WMAQ in 1928. By running until 1960 on various networks it became the longest-running radio program in broadcast history and one of the most popular; Amos 'n' Andy's national audience in the 1930s was estimated at 40 million, in a country that then had about 130 million people. Correll's white man's take on blackness offends many people these days because of its presumption if not its crudity. The mere mention of the shows induces a cringe of the kind feminists feel watching "I Love Lucy". As a result, sadly, Correll's gifts for characterization and voices are underestimated.

Stand Up Comics
New media--recording, films, and especially television--opened opportunities for a new generation of Illinois satirists, clowns, and comics after World War II. Steve Allen grew up partly in Chicago, with his Irish in-laws, with whom his vaudevillian mother left him while she was on the road. It was there, he explained later, that he honed his skills at repartee that stood him in such good stead as the host of the original "Tonight Show," where he virtually invented the late-night talk show.

Another TV pioneer was "Lonesome" George Gobel, whose award-winning variety shows were a staple of the broadcast lineups in the 1950s and '60s. Gobel was born in Chicago in 1920. The first room he worked was his father's grocery, where he imitated the customers; at 11 he made his debut singing (accompanying himself on guitar) on Chicago radio, on the WLS Barn Dance, and had a bit part of the old "Tom Mix Show."

His leisurely delivery led many revved-up city folks to mistake him as slow-witted. Gobel once complained of being misunderstood as a yokel, saying that he was "really a city boy at heart." But there was always a hint of country in Gobel. His apprenticeship was not the big city vaudeville circuit but radio stations in places like Chattanooga and St. Louis. On screen he was the comic embodiment of the de-ethnicized white small-town American washed up on the nation's cities and their suburbs by a rising tide of postwar affluence. The new world they lived in left Gobel no less dazzled than the rest. (In 1954 an admiring Gobel said, "If it weren't for electricity, we'd all be watching television by candlelight.")

Yokels were not what the critics thought of when they first heard the work of The Second City troupe. An offshoot of a University of Chicago theater group, Second City began offering improvisational comedy with a satirical edge in a Wells Street club in 1959 and was still going strong 32 years later. Second City did for a new generation of satirically-inclined actors and writers--the familiar Chicago wise guy with a college education--what vaudeville had done for their punch-line-oriented forebears. It gave bright but inexperienced talents a place to hone their skills--a place, in short, to be bad.

Through the 1970s, Second City helped produce some of the era's best-known club comedians and comedic actors. A partial list includes Alan Arkin, Ed Asner, Shelley Berman (who invented the style of comedy that Bob Newhart would later perfect), Barbara Harris, Linda Lavin, Mike Nichols, Elaine May (the last two forever famous as Nichols & May), Paul Mazursky, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara (the last two best known as the team of Stiller & Meara), Paul Sand, Joan Rivers, Avery Schreiber, David Steinberg, Robert Klein, Fred Willard, Peter Boyle, Harold Ramis, John Belushi, and Bill Murray. Among Chicago institutions of learning, only the University of Chicago can boast of such accomplished alumni.

While Second City was improvising a different future of American comedy on Wells Street, two other local performers were expanding the possibilities of stand-up comedy. Bob Newhart was born in Chicago in 1928. After Army service he came back to the city to work as an accountant and then as an advertising copywriter. Unease at the corporate culture plus vague theatrical ambitions coalesced in the routines that filled the record album "The

About this contributor
James Krohe Jr. has been a critic and commentator on things Illinoisan for more than 25 years. He is writing the Illinois Humanities Council's new guide to Illinois history and culture, Seeing Illinois.

Q&A: Laughing with Playwright Rebecca Gilman

Phoebe Stein Davis

Detours Senior Editor Phoebe Stein Davis asked award-winning playwright Rebecca Gilman to reflect on the role humor plays in her work -- productions that treat the most serious and dark topics, from racism to murder and stalking. Gilman offers unique insight into her plays and also into the place for humor in today's theater and society.

Your plays have been called "provocative," "progressive," and "issue-oriented." Do you think these words accurately describe your work? Would you also call your plays "funny"?

I think the first two plays of mine to receive any attention -- Spinning Into Butter and Boy Gets Girl -- could be described as issue-oriented plays. I started with a theme with both of those plays whereas I usually start with characters or situations. I don't think any of my other plays are issue-oriented, really, but once people get an idea about you as a writer it's hard to shake that. I do like to think of myself as a "provocateur." And I mean that in a completely French sense, in that I like to wear berets and smoke Gitannes and parade around my apartment lip-synching to Yves Montand records. And some of my plays are funny, I think, but others are just downright depressing. I try to alternate.

Do you consciously use humor in your work?

I do try to include humor in most of what I write. What usually happens though, is that the bits I think are hilarious meet with dead silence from the audience, while the parts I think are extremely poignant and profound cause the audience to laugh so hard they fall out of their chairs. I used to be bothered by this but what I found was that a lot of the laughter came from the audience's identifying with the characters. It was kind laughter, for a lack of a better way to put it. But I still laugh at the parts I find funny and actors in my plays always tell me they know when I'm out there, because I'm the only one laughing at my own jokes.

What role does humor play in your exploration of such dark topics as racism, stalking, poverty, and murder?

I subscribe to the Mary Poppins "spoonful of sugar" philosophy of playwriting. I think that a lot of the subjects I explore could make for some pretty relentless drama and while there's certainly a place for relentless drama I think that audiences simply get worn out if they're not given some room to breath. I think the proper amount of laughter can diffuse the tension in a play and allow the audience to sort of sit back and get ready for the next idea or conflict.

In my play Spinning Into Butter, which deals with racism on a small college campus in Vermont, I tried to strike a balance between a comedy of manners and a serious exploration of white racism. But I worked very hard to make sure that the comedy wasn't simply a diversion -- that the ideas of the play were still being explored, although satirically. I think that the subject matter actually allowed for that. In my play The Glory of Living, however, which tells the story of a young woman who becomes a killer at the behest of her abusive husband, there's nothing funny going on. So a lot depends on the material.

Would you consider your plays "black/dark comedy"? How do you define that term?

My plays have been described as dark, and funny (and vapid and incompetent, but we won't go into that) but in spite of that I don't think they're black comedies. I would say a black comedy starts with a dark subject and tries to make it comedic whereas I seem to go at it from the opposite direction. I usually set out to write a comedy and it quickly becomes tragic. I've twice tried to write romantic comedies and the one turned into a play about stalking and the other turned into a play about prostitution and shattered dreams. So. Don't know what that says about me.

Do you see a role for humor in theater today? Is this a vein that has been mined/or is being mined in contemporary theater?

Absolutely I see a role for humor today. First of all I'm not one of those beret-wearing, Gitannes-smoking, Yves-Montand-lip-synching artistes who think that if it's not existential it's crap. I love a good comedy as much as the next guy and I see nothing wrong with entertainment for entertainment's sake. But the comedies I love best are ones that are smart and insightful and that poke fun at sacred cows. I get a huge kick out of the Moss Hart/George S. Kaufman comedies like You Can't Take it With You or The Man Who Came to Dinner. Or Kaufman and Marc Connelly's Beggar on Horseback. These were the plays I read in high school and they were very funny but they also had heart.

When you look at the theatre landscape today you see a lot of variety and that's good for everyone. It's good for the audiences to have a choice, and it's good for artists because it means that there's room for all of us. This past fall on Broadway you could see Proof or The Tale of the Allergist's Wife; and there were revivals of Hedda Gabler and Noises Off opening within a few weeks of each other. This says to me that theatre is healthy and that producers are willing to back a lot of different plays in different genres instead of everyone looking for the next Urinetown.

Beyond a cathartic purpose, what role do you see humor playing for us in today's society post 9/11?

I would never underestimate how important it is to be able to lose yourself in laughter. A few days after the terrorists attacks on New York and Washington, my partner Charles and I went to the video store with the express purpose of finding something to take our minds off of the tragedies unfolding on the news and we came home with "Caddyshack." Not high art but boy, I tell you, watching Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Murray made us feel better for a couple of hours. I wouldn't say that we escaped anything, but we felt better for a couple of hours and if that's what comedy can offer people then that's a huge and important thing. But what I just said, Preston Sturges said tons better in his movie "Sullivan's Travels." If you haven't seen it you should go out and rent it right now.

What makes you laugh?

That scene in Caddyshack when Rodney Dangerfield is out on the golf course, and he says, "Screw it, let's dance!" and he cranks up the radio in his golf bag and they all get down to Journey's "Any Way You Want It."

Rebecca Gilman is a playwright whose plays include Blue Surge, Spinning Into Butter, The Glory of Living and Boy Gets Girl. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a proud member of The Clowny Collective, a playwrights collective dedicated to producing original works in alternative spaces. 

Selection from Days and Nights at the Second City

Bernard Sahlins

Allen Ginsberg had read his poem "Howl" in October 1955, and The Second City was part of the expression of a growing anti-establishment sentiment. The sixties, the rebellious sixties, were dawning as a counter to the conformist fifties, and questions were being asked. As usual, literature led the way. Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg; Bellow, Roth, and Glass; Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, and Norman O. Brown. In comedy, the careers of Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce, and Mort Sahl were beginning to be noticed beyond the counterculture. To put Eisenhower and Nixon on stage, indeed to do anything topical, to smash icons, to discuss the events of the day from the points of view of well-acted characters, was deliciously new and terribly exciting for young audiences. We were often treated to the phenomenon of open-mouthed young people, hanging about forever after each show, bedazzled by hearing their concerns expressed on stage.

One of the joys of the review form is its immediacy. A straight play can take years between its conception and its appearance before the public. With a review scene, an idea conceived in the morning can be seen on the stage that night. And one can capture the sometimes ephemeral visit of the zeitgeist, reflecting the preoccupations of the actors and the audiences at a given moment in time. The review form is flexible and can stretch to receive even the most abstract of concepts.

A certain amount of oppression is good for comedy. The firmer the taboo, the more excitement when it's violated-like Eve's apple made more delicious by being forbidden. But unlike the Beats, unlike Bruce, we represented the respectable, the acceptable face of dissent. We were neither hostile nor in a rage. We did not separate ourselves from the mainstream. Our irony was gentled by the fact that we included ourselves among its targets. We soon stopped trying to save the world in favor of laughing at it. We did not preach the apocalypse. Our audiences laughed the laugh of recognition.

We were, of course, political liberals. And we took our easy shots at the Ku Klux Klan, at Nixon, at racism. But we also recognized that the proper target of a satirist is himself and the members of his own class, their shibboleths, beliefs, and dogmas. The worthiest scenes exposed our own culpability in the face of such issues as racial prejudice and injustice.

Another reason for our success was not artistic but financial. Mostly through sheer dumb luck we had stumbled on a form, and a formula, that made for economic advantages unusual in the theatre. We had a lower cost base than even a storefront theatre. With no set, with a couple hundred dollars' worth of costume elements, with a small cast, with one musician and a stage "crew" consisting of one combination light, sound, and stage management person, we were lean. There were other savings. We rehearsed a new show with the same cast that played the old one. We earned extra revenue from serving drinks. We never advertised.*

These factors enabled us to keep our prices down. In a business notorious for being transient, we survived and even flourished with a relatively small theatre.

But the chief reasons for our survival, aside from our favorable business setup, were the intelligent actors, highly skilled at both writing and acting, guided by the genius of Paul Sills. Plus the fact that not one of us, including our savvy, loyal waitresses, wanted anything other than a good, uncompromising show. Because we had a bar and served at tables, people often characterized us as a nightclub. To them I would explain that we were a theatre that served drinks, not a bar that put on a show.

That is the sum of it. We appeared at the right time with a great format, a viable financial venture, a great director, and marvelous actors. Although we were and still are known as political satirists, the fact is that politics was but a fraction of the subjects we considered. We often disappointed those who held the idea that we should be more heavily engaged in social critiques. But irony was our metier. We applied it to the family, to courting, to work and the workplace. We parodied Mozart and Superman. We sang songs about nature. We were young people talking to young people.

And it didn't hurt that we were inexpensive. We felt from the beginning that our competition was not other theatres but movies, and we always tried to be within a few dollars of the price of a movie ticket. With all that, it was an actor's medium, and it was Paul Sills who held us all to the highest standards of acting.

After a couple of months it became apparent that we were indeed a success. And while it is true that every actor, every director, writer, producer in the theatre expects a miracle each time out, there coexists a pessimism that accepts the many failures. "I must complain," said Swift, "that the cards are ill-shuffled till I have a good hand." And in this business good hands are rare.

No wonder so few, if they do triumph, avoid the perils and pitfalls created by success. I don't mean the obvious discomfort of having one's privacy constantly invaded.* I mean the quietly insidious ways in which the promise of success can affect the work at hand. Guilt, hope, fear, desire: these form a dangerous concoction. As I look back on twenty-five years of The Second City, I see clearly that our deepest problems came from our successes, starting with my co-founders, Paul and Howard.

Howard was a free spirit, chafing at any long-term commitments. His departure was amicable and, as I see now, inevitable. Paul had a more complex reaction. In a most subtle way it was difficult for him to deal with success. In the theatre a production is always a group achievement. Thus, oddly, theatrical success is a leveler. In the theatre the director and some of the actors may have been stars going into a production or may become stars as a result of a production, but custom and indeed reality impose a "we're all in this together" attitude which mandates that success be shared. It wasn't that Paul was greedy or nonsharing; far from it. But somehow success was noisy, disturbing his muse.

Two months after our opening, it looked like we would survive, but Paul's inquietude that had propelled us to this point did not fade. Paul paled at he thought of endlessly doing shows in a single style. The telltale signs of his restlessness were evident. Already he was talking of the Story Theatre form that he eventually staged on Broadway and for television.

This was the first of many times that I found myself trying to keep things together. At that point, if Paul went, we all went. I had a sneaky solution.

In some of our earlier incarnations we had worked with an impossibly talented, impossibly demanding gentleman named Del Close. I sent for Del some six months after we opened. Sensing that Paul was alarmed, even panicky, at the prospect of doing show after show, I thought it might be helpful to have Del Close around if we needed a director. We had worked with Del in the past and had found this acerbic, quick-tongued, excessive man to be a genius, a dark genius- from Kansas yet. When he wasn't astounding audiences with intelligent wit, he was drinking, drugging, and destroying himself. He was the quintessential beatnik-Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg rolled into one. Del, who died in the year in which this book was written, and I had a longstanding, sometimes good-natured argument about the use and abuse of improvisation. He found in it a magical, transcendent quality that resulted in a unique stage expression. I saw it as a technique, a stage tool like mime or fencing. He maintained that it was indeed an art form, deserving to be elevated to presentational status. I felt that to do so was a self-indulgence, that improvisation elevated to a form of presentation failed most of the time, that any scene could benefit from editing, concision, and shaping.

Del devoted the last years of his life to teaching and inspiring a small, devoted band of committed improvisers. It was a guru-disciple relationship that bred fervent devotees to improvisation as an almost mystical form of theatrical magic.

On the night before Del died, there was a party in the basement recreation room of his hospital. Dozens of people were there to pay their respects in what was really an affecting celebration, sort of a wake with the central figure alive and present. The party was only slightly marred by the Druid ceremony that closed the evening (Del was a witch). Del himself, white-haired and white-bearded but with impish grin intact, sat there with air tubes and IVs snaking around his wheelchair, clearly enjoying it all. When I approached to pay my respects, he wagged a finger at me and half-bellowed, "It is an art form," and then went into what I thought was a long chuckle.

I said, "Del, for tonight it is an art form." Where upon someone said, "You're standing on his air tube." It was like a bad Second City improvisation. I hastily slid away and all was well again. The next day Del died, having willed his skull to the Goodman Theatre to be used in the gravedigger's scene in Hamlet.

Now that I look back on it, I think my bringing in Del might have been a shameless sort of manipulation. But it worked. Del was the spur to Paul's competitive nature. Paul directed another show. Later Del joined the company as an actor, escaped briefly to San Francisco, and then returned to direct. Actors loved him in what I called their "let's eat babies together, send up our parents, and do drugs" mode. Eventually, his excesses were unsupportable.

Also rejoining us from previous ventures soon after we opened was Sheldon Patinkin. Sheldon, twenty-four years old at the time, was a prodigy. A talented pianist (he had steered us through a production of the Three-Penny Opera when he was nineteen) and opera lover, and widely read, Sheldon, in addition to being an achiever, was also the group's Jewish mother and its priest. He listened to confessions, took no sides, was always available and generous with his sympathy. I hired Sheldon as general manager and general assistant to everybody.

Early in 1961 Sheldon was supplanted-no, augmented-as the Jewish mother of us all by the real article. Joyce Sloane joined us, at first selling benefit performances to small organizations, then taking on a general role as associate producer, a role she filled for me for twenty-five years. Joyce is calm, infinitely loving, and generous as a saint.

Hundreds of actors have appeared on Second City stages over its forty some years, and I swear that Joyce keeps in touch with all of them, remembers their birthdays and their children's names, follows their careers, visits them in New York or California or Toronto, calls, writes, and sends presents. She is universally loved. No small part of her job was to heal the wounded feelings often left by Paul or myself. Nor are Joyce's maternal ministrations confined to The Second City. The entire Chicago theatre community basks in her beneficence.

This, then, is how it was at the start: Howard, Paul, myself, Joyce, Sheldon, Del, a successful show. It was a good beginning, but we had no presentment of how quickly our lives were to change.

Days and Nights at the Second City
By Bernard Sahlins
Edited by Ivan R. Dee

About this contributor
Bernard Sahlins was born in Chicago and studied at the University of Chicago before he turned to the theatre. He has won the Sergel Prize for playwriting and several Joseph Jefferson Awards for directing, and has produced television specials for HBO, Granada Television, and CBS.

Sylvia

Nicole Hollander

 

 

 We've all been traumatized by the events of September 11. We worried about anthrax. We fear another terrorist attack. We've got a lot on our minds. Who can blame us, if like the woman in my cartoon we're too preoccupied to notice our civil liberties are in danger?

Why not let John Ashcroft define our democracy? And why not repeat our past mistakes.... let's put all young Muslim men in desert camps and apologize later.

The challenge of this cartoon was to be oblique and humorous about a serious issue. I set it in the style of the '40s detective story... complete with a curvy dame in trouble. She throws herself on the mercy of the Lonely Detective, friend of those who have no friends, a man fatally attracted to redheads and lost causes.

His client is distraught. She's turned the house upside down searching for her civil liberties, but they're gone. She fears they've been stolen. Can he get them back for her? It's his kind of case, a long shot with no fee in sight, and the cops will probably knock him around in the process... but he's used to that. It's part of the job.

About this contributor
Nicole Hollander is the creator of the syndicated cartoon strip Sylvia, which appears in many newspapers, but not really as many as she would like. If you can help, she would appreciate it and so would the cats.