A humorist is an
intellectual who uses
humor, or
wit, in
writing or
public speaking, but is not an artist who seeks only to elicit laughter.[1] Humorists are distinct from
comedians, who are
show business entertainers whose business is to make an audience laugh. It is possible to play both roles in the course of a career. A raconteur is one who tells
anecdotes in a skillful and amusing way.
Mark Twain (pen name of Samuel Langhorn Clemens, 1835–1910) was widely considered the "greatest humorist" the U.S. ever produced, as noted in his New York Times obituary.[2] It's a distinction that garnered wide agreement, as
William Faulkner called him "the father of
American literature".[3]
The United States national cultural center, the
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, has chosen to award a
Mark Twain Prize for American Humor annually since 1998 to individuals who have "had an impact on American society in ways similar to the distinguished 19th century novelist and essayist best known as Mark Twain".[4] Despite the name, conferral of the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize does not make the awardee a humorist. As of 2019[update], the center has chosen to confer the prize on twenty-one comedians[5] and one playwright;[4] only two recipients, the comedian
Steve Martin and the playwright
Neil Simon, are commonly recognized as humorists in the sense of Twain.
Distinction from a comedian
Humor is the quality which makes experiences provoke laughter or amusement, while
comedy is a
performing art. The nineteenth-century German philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse of humor (a German
loanword from English) to mean any type of comedy. A humorist is adept at seeing the humor in a situation or aspect of life and relating it, usually through a story; the
comedian generally concentrates on jokes designed to invoke instantaneous laughter. The humorist is primarily a writer of books, newspaper or magazine articles or
columns,
stage or
screen plays, and may occasionally appear before an audience to deliver a lecture or narrate a written work. The comedian always performs for an audience, either in live performance, audio recording, radio, television, or film.[6]
To me, there is a great difference between a humorist and a clown, and I had hoped that life for the Firesign Theatre would have led more toward the world of Mark Twain than the world of Beepo. The humorist is a happy soul; he comments from the sidelines of life, safe behind the keyboard or pen; not forced to mold his thinking to the direct response of an audience, he has indirection on his side. He has time to think. Beepo, on the other hand, takes his chances directly facing—or mooning—the audience; a buffoon, a patsy, a performer, he is out in the open and his audience, unlike a humorist's, becomes necessarily half-friend and half-enemy.
Renowned
polymathBenjamin Franklin (1706–1790), as a newspaper editor and printer, became one of America's first humorists, most famously for Poor Richard's Almanack published under the pen name "Richard Saunders".
Mark Twain (pen name of Samuel Langhorn Clemens, 1835–1910) was widely considered the "greatest humorist" the U.S. ever produced, as noted in his New York Times obituary.[2] It's a distinction that garnered wide agreement, as
William Faulkner called him "the father of
American literature".[3]
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) was a journalist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of
American English.[8] Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the 20th century. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians and contemporary movements. He is known for dubbing the
Scopes trial "the Monkey Trial".
Bennett Cerf (1898–1971) was one of the founders of the publishing firm
Random House, known for his own compilations of jokes and
puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his television appearances on the panel game show What's My Line?[9]
Garrison Keillor (born 1942) is an author, storyteller, voice actor, and radio personality, best known as the creator and host of the
Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) show A Prairie Home Companion from 1974 to 2016. He created the fictional Minnesota town
Lake Wobegon, the setting of many of his books. He created and voiced the
hardboiled detective parody character
Guy Noir on his radio show.
Gary Owens (1934–2015) was a long-time afternoon radio show host in Los Angeles.
Britain and Ireland
Nancy Astor: "If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee!" Winston Churchill: "And if I were your husband I would drink it."
—Churchill is the most cited politician in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations with 32 quotes.[10]
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) was one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century.[14]
Noël Coward (1899–1973) was a playwright, composer, director, actor and singer.
Alan Coren (1938–2007) could be considered the English equivalent of Bennett Cerf: a writer and satirist who was well known as a regular panelist on the BBC radio quiz The News Quiz and a team captain on BBC television's Call My Bluff. Coren was also a journalist, and for almost a decade was the editor of Punch magazine.
Margaret Cameron (1867–1947), novelist, short story writer, playwright, and author of non-fiction works related to mysticism.
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), a writer for Vanity Fair, Vogue and other magazines, playwright, and a close friend of Benchley, was known for her biting, satirical wit.
Erma Bombeck (1927–1996) was a newspaper columnist and writer of 15 books who specialized in humorously describing
midwesternsuburban home life.
Kajetan Abgarowicz (1856–1909) was an Armenian-Polish journalist, novelist and short story writer.
Sholom Aleichem (1859–1916) was the pen name of the leading
Yiddish author and playwright Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, on whose stories the musical Fiddler on the Roof was based.
Purushottam Laxman Deshpande (1919–2000) was an Indian writer and humorist known for his stand-up comedy and character sketches. His writings were translated into many other languages, including English.
Sometimes a comedian will adopt a writing career and gain notability as a humorist. Some examples are:
Will Rogers (1879–1935) was a
vaudeville comedian who started doing humorous political and social commentary, and became a famous newspaper columnist and radio personality during the
Great Depression. He is an exception to the education rule, as he only completed a
tenth grade education.[17]
Cal Stewart (1856–1919) was a vaudeville comedian who created the character Uncle Josh Weathersby and toured
circuses and
medicine shows. He befriended Twain and Rogers, and in 1898 became the first comedian to make
sound recordings, on
Edison Records.
Garry Moore (1915–1993), known as a television comedian who hosted several
variety and
game shows, after his 1977 retirement became a regular humor columnist for the newspaper The Island Packet of
Northeast Harbor, Maine, with a column titled "Mumble, Mumble". He later released a book of his columns under the same name in the early 1980s.
Victor Borge (1909–2000) was a Danish-American comedian known for bringing humor to
classical music. He wrote three books, My Favorite Intermissions[18] and My Favorite Comedies in Music[19] (both with
Robert Sherman), and the autobiography Smilet er den korteste afstand ("The Smile is the Shortest Distance") with Niels-Jørgen Kaiser.[20]
Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) was an English comic actor who wrote several humorous plays and film scripts.
Woody Allen (born 1935), known as a comedian and filmmaker, early in his career worked as a staff writer for humorist
Herb Shriner.[21] He also wrote short stories and cartoon captions for magazines such as The New Yorker.
Steve Martin (born 1945), comedian and actor, wrote Cruel Shoes, a book of humorous essays and short stories, in 1977 (published 1979). He wrote his first humorous play Picasso at the Lapin Agile in 1993, and wrote various pieces in The New Yorker magazine in the 1990s. He later wrote more humorous plays and two novellas.
Hugh Laurie (born 1959) is an English comic actor who worked for many years in partnership with
Stephen Fry. He is a fan of the English humorist
P. G. Wodehouse, and has written a Wodehouse-style novel.[22]
References
^Bergson, Henri (1900). "The Comic Element in Situations and the Comic Element in Words".
Laughter: an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Brereton, Cloudesley; Rothwell, Fred. The Macmillan Company (published 1912).
Archived from the original on 2022-04-08. Retrieved 2021-01-17. A humorist is a moralist disguised as a scientist, something like an anatomist who practises dissection with the sole object of filling us with disgust; so that humour, in the restricted sense in which we are here regarding the word, is really a transposition from the moral to the scientific.
^Voorhees, Richard (1985). "P.G. Wodehouse". In Stayley, Thomas F. (ed.).
Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists, 1890–1929: Traditionalists. Detroit: Gale. pp.
341–342.
ISBN978-0-8103-1712-3. [I]t is now abundantly clear that Wodehouse is one of the funniest and most productive men who ever wrote in English. He is far from being a mere jokesmith: he is an authentic craftsman, a wit and humorist of the first water, the inventor of a prose style which is a kind of comic poetry.
^"Terry Pratchett". Guardian Unlimited. September 24, 2014.
Archived from the original on September 24, 2014. Retrieved September 24, 2014.