Michael—thank you👏 again. Your writing always holds the edge of arrogance with the sublime. I value your knowledge, experience, and creative professional writing skills.💥
Thank you, Joyce. All I know is what I lived through, and try to be as transparent about it as I can. Then, people can decide for themselves whether I am full of it. :-) I also try to be kind, which makes my writing much less entertaining than it would be otherwise.
Not to speak ill of the dead, but Grizzard definitely was B-tier. It used to frustrate me how many titles of his choked the bookstore shelves. But there used to be a lot of Stuckey's across the nation, too.
Jim, one of the things that I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older is that there is a place for B-tier people. Sometimes they’re more successful and beloved than A-tier folks; I could read one line of Erma Bombeck and know the entire rest of the piece. Grizzard is a perfect example of that, and I was glad that he, and Erma, and all the others, could make a fine living.
He was a kind of faux southerner, at a time when it seemed like EVERY humor writer was trying to aw shucks themselves to a payday. He was no Roy Blount.
My essential discombobulated memory from prowling Borders (among others) in the nineties was discovering that the Humor section was basically books to read on the toilet, a couple of weak-assed memoirs by standups, MadLibs (of course) and then, to cut to the chase, nothing by SJ Perelman. At all. Nada. Nor any of his contemporaries.
Despair set in. It really hasn’t ever left, has it?
It was weird how sometime around 1995 the entire publishing business gave up on humor writing as a thing normal people bought. There was money firehosing in every direction in comedy, and publishers suddenly lost interest in anything that didn't have a huge platform. In 1985, people like Ian Frazier and Mark O'Donnell could get published; ten years later, it was The Onion or nothing. I think they decided "the zeitgeist" was that "people don't read funny books."
Pretty much what I think as well. Hard to accept that this decision was made by humans in the publishing industry. The ghost of Bennett Cerf is wailing and moaning in heaven, but for all the good it does he might as well be playing nine-pins in the Catskills.
Well, remember Neil that editors in 1995 were exquisitely attuned to "what was hip," and what was hip was Hollywood and TV, not literary culture. So a humor book was only viable if it hooked into something they were interested in, like a Sex in the City quizbook, or golf or cats or cigars or the OJ Simpson trial. That is, something that didn't really deliver any kind of meaningful, durable connection between the author and the reader. The book as gesture, book as gift. Twenty years of humor books that weren't really books -- that were book-like objects -- and readers stopped buying them. Today if you go to a B&N, the humor section is a catastrophe, books for people who like to do anything but read books. The whole B&N shows an industry laughably desperate to sell things other than books -- puzzles, socks, chocolate, pens, games...
It also must be said that humor seemed to be male-coded, and the disinterest-verging-on-distaste I encountered from female editors was curdling. A humor book about Jane Austen = sale. A humor book about fantasy football = no sale. As the genders become less rigid, you see less of this (thankfully), but the damage has been done; whereas once you had a zillion viable humorists (supported mostly by the book and magazine industry), there just isn't much out there. There are comic novels, and funny memoirs, but...no Calvin Trillins, much less Lewis Grizzards, as far as I can see.
Calvin Trillin is a secular saint to me. We grew up knowing his family (KC, natch), and I believe I have all his books, or eleven of them, at any rate, in the middle of a bookshelf framed by SJ Perelman to the left and PG Wodehouse to the right.
I’ve often thought that a lot of the shallowness in that era was, in part, attributable to cocaine. But there’s many culprits and many excuses and all that. Still, I imagine that you could probably trace much of it back to decisions made or opinions voiced by a single individual, and if I could travel back in time and find that individual, I’d hop aboard a steamroller and flatten him.
Michael—thank you👏 again. Your writing always holds the edge of arrogance with the sublime. I value your knowledge, experience, and creative professional writing skills.💥
Thank you, Joyce. All I know is what I lived through, and try to be as transparent about it as I can. Then, people can decide for themselves whether I am full of it. :-) I also try to be kind, which makes my writing much less entertaining than it would be otherwise.
Not to speak ill of the dead, but Grizzard definitely was B-tier. It used to frustrate me how many titles of his choked the bookstore shelves. But there used to be a lot of Stuckey's across the nation, too.
Jim, one of the things that I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older is that there is a place for B-tier people. Sometimes they’re more successful and beloved than A-tier folks; I could read one line of Erma Bombeck and know the entire rest of the piece. Grizzard is a perfect example of that, and I was glad that he, and Erma, and all the others, could make a fine living.
He was a kind of faux southerner, at a time when it seemed like EVERY humor writer was trying to aw shucks themselves to a payday. He was no Roy Blount.
Yeah, Roy is the real deal, a great writer.
Excellent. Boy, it took me down Memory Blvd.
My essential discombobulated memory from prowling Borders (among others) in the nineties was discovering that the Humor section was basically books to read on the toilet, a couple of weak-assed memoirs by standups, MadLibs (of course) and then, to cut to the chase, nothing by SJ Perelman. At all. Nada. Nor any of his contemporaries.
Despair set in. It really hasn’t ever left, has it?
It was weird how sometime around 1995 the entire publishing business gave up on humor writing as a thing normal people bought. There was money firehosing in every direction in comedy, and publishers suddenly lost interest in anything that didn't have a huge platform. In 1985, people like Ian Frazier and Mark O'Donnell could get published; ten years later, it was The Onion or nothing. I think they decided "the zeitgeist" was that "people don't read funny books."
Pretty much what I think as well. Hard to accept that this decision was made by humans in the publishing industry. The ghost of Bennett Cerf is wailing and moaning in heaven, but for all the good it does he might as well be playing nine-pins in the Catskills.
Well, remember Neil that editors in 1995 were exquisitely attuned to "what was hip," and what was hip was Hollywood and TV, not literary culture. So a humor book was only viable if it hooked into something they were interested in, like a Sex in the City quizbook, or golf or cats or cigars or the OJ Simpson trial. That is, something that didn't really deliver any kind of meaningful, durable connection between the author and the reader. The book as gesture, book as gift. Twenty years of humor books that weren't really books -- that were book-like objects -- and readers stopped buying them. Today if you go to a B&N, the humor section is a catastrophe, books for people who like to do anything but read books. The whole B&N shows an industry laughably desperate to sell things other than books -- puzzles, socks, chocolate, pens, games...
It also must be said that humor seemed to be male-coded, and the disinterest-verging-on-distaste I encountered from female editors was curdling. A humor book about Jane Austen = sale. A humor book about fantasy football = no sale. As the genders become less rigid, you see less of this (thankfully), but the damage has been done; whereas once you had a zillion viable humorists (supported mostly by the book and magazine industry), there just isn't much out there. There are comic novels, and funny memoirs, but...no Calvin Trillins, much less Lewis Grizzards, as far as I can see.
Calvin Trillin is a secular saint to me. We grew up knowing his family (KC, natch), and I believe I have all his books, or eleven of them, at any rate, in the middle of a bookshelf framed by SJ Perelman to the left and PG Wodehouse to the right.
I’ve often thought that a lot of the shallowness in that era was, in part, attributable to cocaine. But there’s many culprits and many excuses and all that. Still, I imagine that you could probably trace much of it back to decisions made or opinions voiced by a single individual, and if I could travel back in time and find that individual, I’d hop aboard a steamroller and flatten him.
And how’s your morning going?