Someone gave me a book entitled Texas Humoresque. I was eager to read it and find out about everything funny in the Lone Star State. I was disappointed. Maybe the book was too intellectual, written for people with more intelligence than I possess. Maybe my sense of humor is underdeveloped. Maybe the guy who wrote it is a jerk.
I have never been comfortable laughing AT other people. I prefer to laugh WITH other people. The author of this stilted work is a PhD from Harvard named C. L. Sonnichsen, and he evidently enjoys laughing at other folks, especially Texans. “Author” may be the wrong word. He didn’t write any of the book himself, except the foreword and a few introductions. None of that was funny. I’m reminded of the old saw, “Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach.”
Published in 1990 and subtitled Lone Star Humorists From Then Till Now, the book is a collection of dozens of articles by Texans and some non-Texans. I saw familiar names in the table of contents—Joe Bob Briggs, Leon Hale, John Henry Faulk, H. Allen Smith, and Shine Phillips. I flipped over to a Leon Hale story. He grew up on the edge of the Caprock, on a farm near Petersburg, and wrote for the Houston Chronicle. Leon is a columnist and a humorist and his pieces always leave me with a warm feeling. He is one of my favorite storytellers.
Dr. Sonnichsen picked a Leon Hale article that had to do with Aunt Lizzie dipping snuff, spitting with great accuracy, and talking like an East-Texas hick. I suppose all that would be funny to a Harvard PhD, but I admire the more self-deprecating sense of humor which Hale displays in most of his writing. I remember a bit he did on the proper way to prepare and eat a hamburger, another on how to teach chickens to fly, and his annual articles about the exact location of spring. All of them are wildly funny and none of them have fun at the expense of others.
Hale wrote honestly about his Aunt Lizzie, describing her character, her idiosyncrasies, and her speech patterns. The learned professor chose to ignore all this good work and laugh at the way Aunt Lizzie talked. It was the only way she knew to talk and she’d been talking that way for over eighty years. While the fine doctor was living in a dorm in Boston, reading Chaucer and Shakespeare, Aunt Lizzie was washing clothes on a rub-board, hoeing cotton all day, and cooking on a wood stove. He hasn’t earned the right to laugh at her.
Elsewhere in the book, the good doctor included a drive-in movie review by Joe Bob Briggs. Being a fan of Joe Bob’s, I considered this particular review somewhat mediocre when compared to most of his work. This one dwelt on the fact that Tanya Robert’s boobies were so unimpressive that she popped her top on the big screen and the movie still got a “PG” rating. Joe Bob’s sense of humor and lack of taste finally got him fired at the Dallas newspaper where he worked. I’m not sure if his comments about Oral Roberts and his brother Anal got him fired, or if it was something else, but Joe Bob continued to write and do late-night TV for a devoted audience.
I don’t know why Dr. Sonnichsen assembled this work, except the idea that he must publish something to be taken seriously by the intelligentsia—those brilliant folks back East. The stories he quoted wove the same theme all through the book—Texans are rude, crude, loud, dumb, and lack good taste. They are rural, have double first names, are socially unattractive, and incapable of speaking proper English. The whole state is one big Aggie Joke, told especially for the enjoyment of brilliant Yankees.
Having said all that, I do not believe the man held any malice toward his adopted state. He taught at Texas School of Mines in El Paso (now UTEP) for many years. I think he had a sense of humor warped by too much high-toned education. He picked the right authors but the wrong stories. His PhD is in English Literature and perhaps he should have stayed in that field, instead of wandering into the fields of Texas, where good honest humor is serious business. Humor is necessary for survival here.
I should point out that condescending Harvard PhD’s may not be alone in their distain for what they consider lesser beings. Many Texans, including me, demonstrate a biased point of view when it comes to our well-educated neighbors to the north. I don’t think that will change—look at how the Kennedy family treated Lyndon—and what he thought about them.
Leon Hale said, “Nobody reads books anymore. If you think people read books, just write one.” Dr. Sonnichsen published this book in 1990. Thankfully, neither has been heard of since.
No comments:
Post a Comment