Will Cuppy

The most recent category for the links here, all the way at the bottom of the right-hand menu, is labeled “The Pantheon.” These aren’t authors who’ve necessarily influenced my style (although no doubt many of them have); they aren’t all authors who’ve meant a lot to me for my whole life (although some of them have). Instead, they’re authors who at one time or another bowled me over with the unexpected, offering surprising insights into what writing could possibly achieve.

One who didn’t make the cut, although I sure thought about including him, was Will Cuppy.

It was during the summer of 1964 that I first encountered Cuppy’s The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. Earlier that year I’d been introduced to James Thurber, thanks to my 7th-grade English teacher Mr. Krause; I had almost made up my mind that I wanted to grow up to be a Professional Humorist or, failing that, a Professional Teller of Occasional Jokes.

And then I hit Cuppy. (It was almost exactly like that, a collision.)

Like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Cuppy’s version …of Everybody purports to tell the history of a civilization. Or rather, in Cuppy’s case, a history of civilization itself, from the Egyptians to the American Revolution. (Cuppy died in 1949 before the book was finished, so there’s no telling for sure how much further he wanted to take it.) Each chapter represents a single notable individual in history; the Egyptians, for example, are handled by chapters on Cheops and Cleopatra.

But what amazed me about Cuppy wasn’t his subject matter, but his style.

Not sure how best to describe it: slapstick; burlesque; rapid-fire silliness; satire; parody; joke after joke after joke — practically a one-to-one sentence-to-joke ratio, coming so fast and with such single-mindedness that you couldn’t always tell for sure that something was funny or not, because by the time you stopped to consider it you were already well into the next line.

He added to the general keep-the-reader-off-balance effect by including copious footnotes. These do not provide scholarly references — they’re often (also joking) commentary on the commentary in the main text, or just plain non-sequiturs which he apparently couldn’t quite crowbar into the footnoted paragraph.

Here’s a brief sample, footnotes and all. It’s the beginning of the George III chapter. (That’s William Steig’s depiction of George III in the drawing above; Steig illustrated the first edition of The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody.)

George III was King of England during the American Revolution. Naturally, our side won. The English had plenty of ammunition and were very good at fighting. They just picked on the wrong people, that’s all. ¹

As his name implies, George III was the third of the Georges, of whom there were four from 1714 to 1830, or an average of one every twenty-nine years. Nobody seems to have realized that this was an awful lot of Georges.

The trouble with having so many Georges all at once is that they tend to become blurred and to be known vaguely as the four Georges, or any old man in a wig. How to tell the Georges apart if something of a problem. ²

Anyway, George I was the one who couldn’t speak English and didn’t try. He was Elector of Hanover, a place in Germany, but was regarded as heir to the throne because he was a descendant of Mary Queen of Scots. He was brought over by the commercial interests and reigned until 1727 without the least notion of what anybody was talking about.

During this time there was no Queen of England. George I kept his wife in prison because he believed that she was no better than he was. ³

Although George I was extremely dull, his subjects were very sporting about it. They felt that, after all, the Georges were just getting started and the next few might be different.

George II, however, was practically the same thing, except that he was smaller and noisier and redder in the face. When agitated or angry he would throw his wig across the room and kick his toes against the wall. ⁴

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¹ On July 9, 1776, the statue of George III in Bowling Green, New York, was torn down. To compound the insult, the lead of which it was made was cast into bullets to shoot at King George’s men.

² At the time it may have been easy enough, but today it is almost a lost art.

³ He was wrong there.

⁴ After a while his feet began to hurt. He thought it was because his shoes were too tight.

Much of this still cracks me up. In fact, from that bit about “an average of one [George] every twenty-nine years,” I see an echo in one of my own stories. (I’ll have to check to confirm which one. Thought it was “The Bug,” but no.)

So, you ask, why not move Cuppy to The Pantheon?

As I said, I hesitated, wavered, reconsidered for a good while about this. Ultimately, though — when I went back and re-read large chunks of the book, I thought no: it was fine for me at the time, and the style and tone infected my writing for a couple years thereafter. But it’s just too tedious to read, for my taste. And so I think Cuppy is one of those pleasures meant to be savored once, for a while, and then put up on the shelf with the Slinky, the Gumby, the plastic airplane model, and the other toys of childhood.