#Humorists

[uwmspeccoll]

Milestone Monday

On this day, October 7 in 1849, American writer, poet, and humorist James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) was born in Greenfield, Indiana. Know as the "Hoosier Poet," Riley helped to establish a Midwestern literary identity.

To commemorate this milestone, we present some pages from Nye and Riley's Railway Guide, which Riley wrote with fellow Midwestern humorist Edgar W. Nye (1850-1896), published in Chicago by the Dearborn Publishing Company in 1888. In 1885, Riley and Nye formed a partnership and began touring the country to give joint presentations. This book, produced during their touring days, is a collection of humorous anecdotes and poems intended to parody popular tourist literature of the day, and was successful enough to go through at least three reprints.

Most of the illustrations shown here are by American cartoonist Walt McDougall (1858-1938), but the book includes illustrations by several other artists, including Baron de Grimm and Eugene Zimmerman.

View other Milestone Monday posts.

[geminicollisionworks]

Farewell to the great Bruce McCall, one of the greatest humorists of the last 50 years.

He has been best known in recent years for his (many) New Yorker covers, but his 1970s work for National Lampoon (partially collected in the book Zany Afternoons) was truly astonishing -- looks back at inventions and events that never happened, gloriously presented, with a satiric edge that pointed to a disgusting, tacky, cruel, and cheap underside to all that conspicuous consumption.

I grew up marveling at his work, and the inane advertising copy that floats through episodes of Life With Althaar would not have existed without his influence.

I'll share some more in the next days as I find clean digital copies (my sizable collection of 1970s NatLamps is buried in basement storage).

You’ve all heard of Titanic, but how about the Tyrannic?

R.M.S. ‘Tyrannic’ - 'The Biggest Thing In All The World’

     We can here but peep at Tyrannic’s labyrinth of Public Rooms. They are 103, not including the Kandahar Verandah Grill. First Class passengers are reminded that all meals, excluding teas, must be ordered three months in advance of sailing. The Maitre d'Hotel will signal conclusion of dinner. Persons without references cannot be considered for the Captain’s Table guest list.

     An area equivalent to Hindustan is devoted to food and its preparation aboard Tyrannic. Forty tons of Stilton cheese are consumed on every crossing, as are 214 miles of sausage and melons sufficient to fill the Grand Canyon of Arizona. All excess livestock is thrown overboard on sight of landfall. Steerage is reminded that eating toffee in bed is forbidden.

     Gentlemen are requested to refrain from riding ponies through the Steerage after 8:00 P.M. While the Captain emphasizes the rules of proper attire at all times, gentlemen may remove their spats in the Gymnasium. Golfers from the First Class have right-of-way through the Steerage. The Chariot Race in the Grand Ballroom is held on the eve of disembarkation. Off limits to Steerage.

     Lifeboat drill is conducted on the first day out at 3:00 P.M. for First Class, and on the last day out at 3:00 A.M. for Second Class and Steerage. One circuit of the Promenade Deck is equivalent to walking from Aix to Paris and return. More ammunition is expended during the skeet shooting on a single voyage than was used in the Crimean War entire. There is a deck of cards in the Steerage Tuck Shop.

     The Tyrannic is so safe that she carries no insurance. Among many advances in her design and construction is the pneumatic bulkhead that seals off Steerage from the rest of the ship in case of flooding. Her wireless equipment is powerful enough to reach Brisbane, Australia, from the vicinity of Greenland.

     Total length of Tyrannic’s hot water piping in First Class alone is estimated to exceed the distance in nautical miles from Lisbon to Durban.

     A Routine voyage uses up six thousand mops, four hundred acres of table linens, and a fifty-gallon drum of Mercurochrome. Kept in the stores are ten miles of shoelaces, one half-ton of flea powder, two hundred caskets, a like number of hummingbirds, and a spare funnel.

     The ship’s newspaper, issued daily, enjoys a larger circulation than the Times of Bombay. More musicians are employed aboard Tyrannic than in the entire city of Vienna. The chandelier in the Grand Ballroom weighs more than the Eiffel Tower, and gives off more light than that structure’s host city of Paris.

     Steerage passengers who board at Liverpool often fail to reach their quarters before Tyrannic has safely berthed at New York. They are advised to run.

These satirical illustrations were created by Bruce McCall, with this copy sourced from Zany Afternoons, a book containing some of McCall’s best comics.

[killerpancakeburger]

Sleeping Beauty Bloopers:

#1

“We shouldn't”, you mumble, looking anywhere but at him.

“Aye we can, fraternization is authorized between military and office personnel.”

That has the merit to make you look back at him, eyes wide in surprise.

“How do you..?”

“Ah checked”, he asserts like it's evident.

"You checked? What do you mean you checked?!"

Soap looks hesitant and sheepish.

"I... asked Price?"

You leap from the couch in shock and consternation, throwing your hands in the air.

"You asked WHO?!?"

"Not so loud, yer gonnae wake-"

You start pacing back and forth.

"WHAT DID YOU EVEN TELL HIM? THAT YOU WANTED TO SHAG HIS ASSISTANT?? OH MY GOD. OH MY FUCKING GOD"

#2

“Can I kiss ye? Please?” he insists, pouting.

The “please” has the effect of a punch in your sternum.

“I… you… uh.. “

His face is way too close to yours, his gaze way too intense for you to do anything else but combust on the spot."

"Ya guys still there?"

Gaz's voice makes you jump so violently, it somehow grants you the strength to send Soap tumbling down on the floor.

"Bloody- Ow!" he lets out, completely taken by surprise, his curse abruptly cut by the thud of his head bumping into the coffee table.

"Sorry!" you exclaim, feeling apologetic but mostly panicked by the view of Gaz and Ghost entering the room.

"Did you need something?"

This is your sorry attempt to change the subject.

"Just makin' sure Johnny's respectin' his bedtime for tomorrow's mission, is all." grunts Ghost.

"What did ah ever dae tae ye, L.T.?" whines Soap as he rises up from the floor, rubbing his head.

You snort despise yourself, before removing your being from the situation as fast as possible, crossing the door's treshold like a race car.

"ANYWAY GOOD NIGHT GUYS! GOOD LUCK FOR THE MISSION!"

[triflesandparsnips]

Accidentally started rereading Northanger Abbey, and was sudden reminded all over again that Jane Austen is, in fact, fucking hilarious.

NA is her parody/satire of Gothic novels at the time, and she starts the book by choosing violence-- she describes the "tragedy" of the main character, Catherine Morland, a girl Determined to be a Heroine even though ALL ODDS are against her: she has a sane father who doesn't lock up his daughters, a healthy mother who didn't die in childbirth, no preternatural talent for music or drawing through which to reveal her Deepest Soul, and-- most shockingly of all-- absolutely zero love interests for whom she can wander the hills mourning their starcrossed fates until she wastes away from the sheer Sentimentality of it all.

But don't worry! She's got this FIGURED OUT. She KNOWS why she has not yet found her TRUE LOVE:

There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no—not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door—not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children.

But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.

(SPOILER: She is introduced to a mysterious young man who lives in an ABBEY, which everyone knows means he has a DEEPLY MYSTERIOUS SECRET PAST and is maybe a TRAGIC HERO or even a ROMANTIC MONSTER and either way this is IT this is Catherine's TIME TO SHINE she is going to get a good grade in DOOMED LOVE, a thing that is normal to want and--)

(...meanwhile Henry Tilney-- an ordinary guy who never expected "get cast as the Hero in some Grand Gothic Romance" to show up on his bingo card-- starts wondering when exactly he started finding Catherine's attempts to locate bloody daggers in his linen closet charming.)

[bugflies00]

"you fell for the character's façade" except it's people once again missing the fact that at any given time there is a 90% chance tommyinnit is making fun of himself

[chaplinfortheages]

Charlie with a visitor to set of “Sunnyside”, Irvin S. Cobb an author, editor, humorist and columnist, circa 1919.

[fidjiefidjie]

😁 Humour du jour 👍

Raymond Devos 👼 Un ange passe ....

Olympia 1994

👋 Bel après-midi

[transparentgentlemenmarker]

Un humoriste inoubliable emporté trop tôt il y a 24 ans, Élie Kakou, qui aurait fêté ses 63 ans ce vendredi 12 janvier 2024, rendait son dernier souffle à Paris a l'âge de 39 ans. Secrètement atteint du virus du sida, le comédien a finalement été emporté par un cancer du poumon. Une maladie qu'il a longtemps cachée aux médias ainsi qu'à sa mère, dans le but de la préserver. "On a toujours protégé ma mère. Elle était cardiaque et ma soeur aînée venait de perdre sa fille d'une leucémie", s'est souvenue Brigitte

[keylana-dragon]

A little bit dangerous, but, baby, that's how I want it A little less conversation and A little more touch my body 'Cause I'm so into you, into you, into you

[francepittoresque]

28 octobre 1905 : mort du journaliste et humoriste Alphonse Allais ➽ http://bit.ly/Alphonse-Allais Débarquant à Paris à l’âge de 25 ans, il devient collaborateur de la revue Le Chat noir et est bientôt célèbre pour sa plume acérée et l’humour absurde et caustique

[groundpear]

🌟Finally completed the "Mamonas but furry" drawing :D. But I still have no idea how do I start explaining this, sorry not sorry 🌟 . .

🌟 2023 carrd | ☕️ Ko-fi 🌟

[uwmspeccoll]

Publishers' Binding Thursday

It's been a couple of weeks since we shared a publishers' binding with our fine internet friends, so here's a bright one to start the semester off right! This is Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New: Latest Gathering. Bill Nye is a pen name used by American humorist and founder of the Laramie Boomerang (which he named after his mule) Edgar Wilson Nye (1850-1896). Nye was educated in River Falls, WI and later moved to Laramie in the Wyoming territory in 1876, where he was justice of the peace, superintendent of schools, a member of the city council, and postmaster.

This book is a collection of humorous short tales or vignettes published by John Lovell Co. around 1888. The cover is a bright blue book cloth with some swirly knots and arches with what looks like a griffin without wings at the center surrounded by leaves. The spine has similar patterns and the title and author stamped in a gold box. It features "new illustrations from original sketches, photographs, memoranda, and authenic sources by Williams, Opper, and Hopkins."

View more Publishers' Binding Thursday posts.

-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

[hyperactivewhore]

I'm kinda bored and curious, and this also will help with my tvd!fame dr, so I'll ask:

What kind of jobs would the Mystic Falls have? Elena is a famous doctor in my dr, I made Damon serve bourbon because idc about him and I feel that Caroline could be a wedding planner but I'm not sure about her. Ideas? Tyler plays in the NBA and I feel Bonnie could be a model, like Rebekah

[adarkrainbow]

As I have been reblogging and looking back at Sleeping Beauty stuff around the Internet, I realized the thing that is bothering me a bit... When it comes to the you know "original" format of Sleeping Beauty.

Everywhere on the Internet you have these posts and videos and whatnot about "The dark truth behind Sleeping Beauty" or "The Horrifying Origins of Sleeping Beauty!", and they all refer to the fact that in the "original" version of the tale, she got raped in her sleep. This is the "dark fact" everybody LOVES to spread around and talk about. Except... Except the version they refer to is Basile's "Sun, Moon and Thalia".

Why does that matter? I'll explain.

Everybody depicts "Sun, Moon and Thalia" as this sort of dark, horrifying tale of a grim and gruesome crime. They will have in their video a dark background, and creepy illustrations, and they will take an ominous horror movie voice and whatnot.

But there's a big problem with that. Basile's stories were all except serious. They were humoristic tales. Or more precisely, they were farcical stories. Farces. There's a reason its "twin compilation", Straparola's fairytale collection, is called "Facetious Nights". So the very idea of presenting these stories as if they were meant to be taken seriously is completely misreading the story's tone. Yes there was a rape - but if you extract this from the entire context and storytelling, you make this tale sound like something it is absolutely not.

"Sun, Moon and Thalia" is not meant to be a horror story. It was not meant to be read as "serious" story. It has nothing to do with either the Grimm or Perrault fairytales. The entirety of the "Pentamerone" is basically a folk-sex comedy. If such a thing can exist.

Every fairytale of the Pentamerone is opened by a small recap of the story announcing what it will be about - and already from the get-go the very two lines opening this recap give the humoristic nature of the tale away. "Thalia dies because of a splinter". I mean come on - the joke is obvious. A girl gets a splinter, she dies. And if this wasn't enough the rest of the sentence can be translated as following: "she is left in a room where the son of the king penetrates and makes her two children". The choice of the word "penetrate" is to highlight the pun in the original line where the prince entering Thalia's bedroom and the prince entering Thalia's body is resumed in one same verb.

For more breakdown of the jokes of the story, see below the cut:

As I said before from the get-go the "curse" is treated as a joke. You have this king that summons scholars to make his daughter's horoscope, right? And what does it say. "She is in great danger... BECAUSE OF A SPLINTER!". This is literaly the killer rabbit of the Monty Pythons.

In this story, what does the little old woman that offered the princess the spindle does, once the princess falls dead? (Because she is dead in this version, a magical death, but dead still). Does she warns everybody and cries for help as in Perrault's version? No! "She was quick to find back the stairs [from which she came in]" and she runs as fast away as she can without warning everybody, because she's not going to get into trouble because of some random girl that wanted to see how to spin.

The whole arrival of the prince is very, VERY unprincely and part of the joke. (Well it is a king here but I'm going to call him "prince" so as to not lose people). So he is hunting, right, and his hunting falcon enters the countryside building in which the king locked up his daughter's corpse. The prince wants to get back his bird, so he knocks - because he believes the house is inhabited. And since nobody answers and he REALLY wants his bird back, he fetches a ladder and is forced to climb up a window like a vulgar thief. And he is royalty, remember.

What is the prince's first interaction with the dead Thalia? Believing she is asleep, he starts talking to her. And since she doesn't answer he kind of shakes her around in trying to wake her up. And then suddenly, realizing she kind of looks good (an that she is visibly not alive anymore), he "does his little business" and promptly puts her back where he found her and leaves. Because he is, like most men in the Pentamerone a stupid horny dog without much morals that has the most sudden and bizarre bursts of sexual desire. Cause again the Pentamerone is a sex comedy.

In fact, in the story of "Sun, Moon and Thalia", the prince is MEANT to come off as quite stupid. He is stupid. First off he didn't get that Thalia was dead when he saw her. Then, as soon as he leaves the funeral-house, it is said he "forgot all about this adventure". Like literaly, he forgets all about it - and only suddenly remembers it randomly when Thalia wakes up. (The narration itself highlights the randomness of the events - the fact the prince remembers Thalia is random and for no reason, and in the same way there are two fairies that randomly appear out of nowhere to take care of the two babies and we are never explained anything about them - they even frighten poor awakened Thalia because she doesn't know who brings her magically food every day). When he sees back Thalia, he is all joyful and happy and he is like "Let's start a family! I'm a dad, woohoo!" ; and then the narration drops the bomb that nothing had foreshadowed: "Now, his wife was waiting for him back at the palace." The randomness of dropping the fact he has a wife is meant to be the joke, since we were led to believe he was a bachelor. But given the prince's tendency to forgetfulness it is very likely that he simply forgot he had a wife.

More of the prince's obvious stupidity and air-headedness. On one side how he betrays Thalia and her children's names to his wife - because he just can't stop repeating and singing their names out loud, day and night, even when eating or sleeping, due to how silly-happy he is. On the other, the reason why he is absent while his wife tortures Thalia: he got angry at a comment of hers, and because he was furious, he literaly had to go to ANOTHER LAND just to vent his anger. Literaly, he leaves his palace and moves to another of his domain just because he got pissy. And why did he get pissy? Because his wife kept ironically singing to him "Eat, because what you eat belongs to you" when she served him his "children" - and the stupid prince, unable to understand what she meant, literaly answers "Of course it belongs to me: I'm the bread-winner of the family, while you're doing nothing and bringing nothing to the house". [Which by the way, highlights the fact that in this couple, the wife is depicted as profiting off the king's wealth and power].

Speaking of the dinner around the fake "children": this meal is another sex joke. Because the two of them, the wife and husband, are "panting with desire" around the dishes, and keep singing stuff like "Oh that's good, oh that's good!" and "Come on, eat, come on eat!" making it all an erotic scene. A ridiculous, grotesque, perverse erotic scene around what one character believes to be a cannibalistic meal, while the other just very loudly appreciates good meat.

When the queen tries to have Thalia killed, Thalia tries to defend herself by the fact she didn't know of the queen's existence, and that any sexual thing that happened between her and the prince was in her sleep - which the queen of course does not believe because of how ridiculous it all seems. I mean you catch who you believe is your husband's lasting extra-marital mistress and what is her excuse? "Oh no you see, he made me my kids when I was asleep. Well kind of dead. I didn't know. No he did not wake me up. I didn't wake up either when the kids were born. I'm a really deep sleeper. And it was because of a splinter you see..." Literaly, imagine yourself in the place of the jealous queen hearing all that.

Thalia gains time on her execution by asking the permission to remove her clothes, and the queen accepts, but as a joke she accepts out of greed because she literaly wants to take back Thalia's dress and jewels for herself. And each time Thalia removes a piece of her clothes, she screams. She screams in hope of alerting the prince. But since the prince is far away, he doesn't hear until the very last scream. Meaning that Thalia literaly strips herself in front of the queen, while screaming every time she takes off a piece of clothing, to visibly no effect (which must leave the poor queen quite confused), and it is only when Thalia gets naked and pushes the final scream that the prince suddenly arrive. You can imagine Thalia going: "FINALLY! I've been screaming for hours now!" (especially when you consider how much pieces of clothing princesses wore at the time).

Literaly one of the threats the prince gives to his wife is "Get ready to go fatten up the broccolli". As a metaphor for being dead and buried underground. Tip-top manly threat. In fact the prince is here quite proficient in ridiculous poetic metaphors: when the cook reveals he saved his children, the prince says "Get ready to move out of the small kitchen of my castle to the vast kitchen of my heart."

And of course the final "moral" of the story is also part of the entire farcical joke that is this story. "People who are lucky receive good fortune, even in their sleep". You literaly have a girl who is randomly raped in her sleep and gives birth to children in her dead-sleep, and then is almost murdered by the rapist' wife... And THAT'S the moral of the story? If you take it all literaly, then you are a fool. Or at least Basile would have called you a fool.

Again, people tend to forget that when it comes to literary fairytales (but also a lot of folk-fairytales) there is a TONE that is important. It is the brothers Grimm and other collectors after them that imposed the idea that fairytales were meant to be read "seriously". A lot, LOT of fairytales were originally humoristic - even going into dark humor or sex comedy. And whenever you go by Straparola or Basile, you HAVE to look at them under the angle of a joke or humor, and search for the puns and caricatures and ridiculousness within these tales. Because these books were meant to be read as such. They are like Rabelais' Gargantua or Shakespeare's comedies. You can of course reinterpret them as "serious" tales... But it won't remove the fact the original was humoristic.

[xacecaxa]

[weirdyearbook]

Source details and larger version.

Lots of fun items in my vintage typewriters gallery.