Decline & fall for fun & profit
Or, Will Cuppy’s comic pessimism
When all this hullabaloo started, the headline to avoid was “Love in the time of corona” because (a) corona doesn’t sound like cholera, (b) most of the stories weren’t about love, and (c) did you even read that book?
Now, the headline everyone’s using is “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” which is much better because (a) it’s a direct reference (b) it’s likely true, and (c) REM is due for a revival.
The song captures a mood of sunny declinism, which seems spot on for the here and now. It’s the Second Great Depression and my sourdough is perfect! And it gets even sunnier when you realize it was always thus. Which is the particular genius of Will Cuppy, an early 20th-century American humorist who wrote the kind of books that could only exist in a certain corner of early 20th-century America. As one critic noted,
His style of humor is unique and, like the taste of an avocado, a little hard to describe.
He wrote titles like How to be a Hermit (a neighbour cooked all his meals) and How to Become Extinct (a biological survey), but his real masterwork was The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. He spent 16 years researching the book, making hundreds of thousands of notes on 3x5 index cards. It was only in 1950, a year after his death, that his friend Fred Feldkamp pulled the whole thing together for publication.
The idea of The Decline was that the great figures of history needed to be nudged off their pedestals, and Cuppy did that by hurling his fact-filled 3x5 index cards at them, Letterman-style. It was said that this work of humor had been found impeccable by historians, who couldn’t peck it at all. It was also said to have been the only item on Dwight Eisenhower’s desk at NATO headquarters.
The book’s gags — a spotty list of which can be found here — are of two types. The first note how wrongheaded most of history was:
He is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds that any other man of his time. He did this in order to impress Greek culture upon them.
Whenever [Charlemagne] decided to help somebody's morals, people would bury their small change and hide in the swamps and forests.
The moral of the story of the Pilgrims is that if you work hard all your life and behave yourself every minute and take no time out for fun you will break practically even, if you can borrow enough money to pay your taxes.
And the second kind remind you that you’re no better:
Attila the Hun was an awful pest, but there are plenty of others. You mustn’t blame him for all your troubles, because most of them are your own fault, and the sooner you realize it the better.
All of Cuppy’s facts and asides add up to this: Everything’s always been a mess, and yet somehow we’ve muddled through. Or as the chief economist of the Bank of England observed this week:
“Apparently Spotify downloads of the REM song ‘It’s The End Of The World As We know It’ peaked two weeks after lockdown began and have been declining since. So perhaps, perhaps, we are seeing some stabilization.”
Quick quips; lightning
“Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between the news value of a bicycle accident in Clapham and the collapse of civilization.”
George Bernard Shaw
“The world would not be in such a snarl
Had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.”
Irving Berlin
“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Orson Welles
That’s the 46th issue of Get Wit Quick, a weekly recline into decline. No index cards were harmed in the writing of Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. When my readers tap the ♥️ below, I feel fine.