THE LAUGH MAKERS: A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF AMERICAN COMEDIANS.
By William Cahn '34. New York: Putnam's,7957. 192 pp. $5.95.
This is not in itself a funny book - save as it brings back to some of us old-timers very pleasant and very humorous recollections. It offers, rather, through text and very frequent pictures, an intriguing survey of American comedians from the days of George Washington to the present. In the introduction Harold Lloyd reminds us that there is something both universal and immortal in comedy, and this volume by a former editor of TheDaily Dartmouth possesses something of that timeless appeal.
We begin with the humorous Yankee "Jonathan" as played by the Englishman Thomas Wignell about 1787 in Royall Tyler s "The Contrast." There may be some question about the author's statement that this was "the first American play, produced by an American, written by an American, played by Americans and with an American theme, but it probably was the first American comedy, and the cast probably did include some native Americans. At any rate, as the author indicates, the character of "Jonathan" established a pattern which persisted through the nineteenth century, sometimes under such varied names as Jeddidiah Homebred, Solomon Swap or Solon Shingle.
And we end with Red Skelton and Jackie Gleason and Martha Raye and their contemporaries and the lament that the role of the comedian in 1957 is not a very promising one.
In the meantime we have been reminded of the careers and the contributions of such figures as Joe Jefferson and James Hackett, Tony Pastor, Eddie Foy, Weber and Fields, Fanny Brice, Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett, Al Jolson, Jimmy Durante, Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, Ed Wynn and the Marx brothers. In fact, how can we stop without including Laurel and Hardy, and Zazu Pitts, Amos and Andy and Marie Dressier, and a score of others who crowd the pages.
Some readers will want to linger over one section, some over another. There is something for everybody from the slap-stick and the cheese-cake of the Mack Sennett beauties to the more mature Chaplin in "The Kid" or "Shoulder Arms," and from the "Ziegfeld Follies" to the Will Rogers who came up by that route to such a position of pre-eminence in the country that his sharp but humorous comments were quoted on the floor of Congress and he became almost a popular legend.
This is a brief and popular account with no claim to the scholarly, and yet even a book with the lighter touch can raise questions. Mr. Cahn ends his story, as we have already noted, with reference to the fact that the type of comedian depicted in these pages seems to be disappearing from the American scene, and he quotes the headline from Variety which reports, "TV Laughs off Comics' Fadeout." May it be that the hyper-sensitiveness which is said to characterize radio and television sponsors, along with some legislators and officials in Washington, makes the role of the free-wheeling comedian a precarious one, and would make a contemporary Will Rogers both dangerous and undesirable? At any rate, this book should appeal to all of us who remember those far-off, happy days and even in the face of Sputnik cherish a lingering .sense of humor.
