July 18, 1973

Importance of Not Being Earnest

Joe E. Brown more than anyone else, knew the importance of not being earnest.

Now, after 81 years of a full life, the great comedian is dead.

His genius helped sustain a nation through four wars and a great economic depression.  These were most earnest times, indeed.  Thank God he was capable of making us laugh at adversity.

In all his obituaries, historians failed to mention one of the great moments of the theatre involving Brown.  Apparently the critics are so provincial that they are ignorant of noteworthy events occurring outside New York City or Hollywood.

Yet, I was there at Detroit in 1943 when The Mouth showed an audience of several hundred a zenith of personal courage and comic ability.

Joe was appearing in "The Show Off," a play he made a classic.  World War II was dragging through the depths of battlefield defeats and casualty lists.  The audience that night had gathered for a couple of hours of diversion from grim realities.

In the play, the show off is confronted with his bragging lies and must reconcile them to keep his girl, his job and his friends.  Desperate and under pressure, the show off is unable to find words of explanation.  Only tight sounds will come out, "Eek.  Awk.  Erk.  Onk, Ump."  With each new sound, a new grimace of frustration.

Each face and each sound prompted a roar of laughter from the audience.

For a full half hour, Joe milked the bit.

It was like a Beethoven symphony - infinite variations on a two-note theme.  My sides ached, literally.  I wished he would stop but wished that he wouldn't.

In next morning's paper we read that just before show time Brown had received a telegram saying his youngest son had been killed in a military flight training accident.  A devoted father, .Brown steeled himself nevertheless to complete the next performance for which adequate notice of cancellation could not be given.

The rest of the play's run in Detroit was cancelled, but those of us who saw the last presentation will always remember it.

Born in Helgate, Ohio, Joe E. Brown ran away from home as a lad to join the circus, eventually winning a place with a trapeze troupe.  He played semi-pro baseball, made a dozen wonderful films and then began his career as a live-stage actor that endeared him to millions.

He was kidded about the generous proportions of his mouth, and a cavernous yawn became his trademark.

As I look back and try to analyze Brown's brand of humor, I discover that it didn't depend upon a ready wit.  Rather, he infected you with a sense of fun.  He refused to take himself seriously - of being earnest.  Once you had caught the mood, what he said was never so important as how he said it.

Brown popularized the post-curtain chat wherein he would come to the footlights, sit on the edge of the stage and talk conversation-style.

His most famous story pertained to a turtle who started out from a bar to fetch some money for a new round of drinks.  After several years had passed the turtle's bar friends began discussing whether the turtle really would come back and treat them.  Whereupon the turtle shouts from the doorway, "If you're going to talk about me that way I'm not going!"

As a joke, the punch line is woefully weak.  As a vehicle for Joe E. Brown to demonstrate his turtle voices and faces, however, the story was superb.  It never failed to bring down the house.  It was this sense of inviting you to have fun with him that packed theatres for so many years.

Brown was a foil for true humor.  Underneath the banter was a touch of sadness.  In the "Show Off", he was painfully insecure.  In "Harvey" he was a reviled eccentric seeking simple friendship.  In "Elmer the Great" he was a small town boy trying to make out in big league baseball.

Aristotle was the first philosopher to ponder Tumor, and he determined that it was "some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive."

Another famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant, defined the cause of laughter as "the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.

A more modern philosopher, Max Eastman, put it in simple terms:

Laughter can occur only after a "mood of play" has been established.

Thereafter, everything that we perceive as funny would be unpleasant if we were serious.

Did Joe E. Brown practice these two rules consciously or instinctively?  No one knows for sure, but I believe it was inherent in the character of the man.

His friends and family - his living son is general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates - record that Joe was inordinately kind and cheerful with everyone.  He and his wife adopted two daughters whom they loved dearly, and Joe gave hundreds of combat-zone performances to our servicemen.  His character shone through his humor and made him immortal.

Where is Joe's replacement?  Where are the comics that will help the next generation face adversity?

The one-line quip rules comedy today.  Laughter is sardonic.  We don't hear audiences begging for a repeat of ridicule.  Smart alec ghost writers churn out double-entendre puns for stand up comics.

We admire wit.  But we have no one to love as a playful friend - someone who can laugh at himself and trick you into doing the same.

I think the new generation will flounder until it finds a true leader of humor as described by Irving S. Cobb:

"I pondered that question of the social attitude of the humorist endlessly when I started out to write.  Mark Twain was my model and I studied his method.

"I concluded that what Mark Twain was saying to mankind as a humorist was this: "Look what fools we are, and I at the head of the procession."

Joe E.  Brown did this with kindness - a very neat trick.

Author: Lindsey Williams