If You Were Really, Really Funny

What would you do?

An Alphabet of Celebrities, The Peter Pan Alphabet, The Mythological Zoo, A Little Book of Bores, Confessions of a Caricaturist, Most Timid in the Land, The Kitten’s Garden of Verses, Pen and Inkings, The Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten, Artful Anticks and A Child’s Primer of Natural History by Oliver Herford

Imagine, though this might be a stretch, that you are very funny. Really, really funny. What avenues do you have? Of course, you could try stand-up comedy, the most brutal of careers aside, perhaps, from beginning a new life as a restaurant entrepreneur. You could make videos for TikTok about your pets; you could steal details and punchlines from people who are definitely not your housemates, the people you went to school and university with. Or you could badly impersonate famous people. All of this is possible.

And I suppose, if you abased and humiliated yourself enough, you could make some money. And get famous, which of course is at least as important, in the modern world.

But that seems too much like hard work. Can you make use of your humour in less effortful ways? The really obvious hustle is podcasting; and naturally, if you can riff with the best of them, that’s what you’ve got to do. No alternative. A few hours of riffing with the boys per week, and your rent’s paid. That’s the dream.

In theory, it can be done.

Only if you were insane, or already very famous, would you try to write a book. People don’t read; virtually no one does. So you’d already be addressing a market of only the most educated and self-serious of your audience. And with so many other options available, are you seriously telling me those people would look to the shelves of (insanely renamed) TG Jones if they really want to laugh?

You must be mad. You must be mad to think that.

But in the past people did read, and they read books and magazines and newspapers. And their lives were, if anything, more in need of laughter than ours. So they read and made newly famous caricaturists, artists with humorous aspects to their work, and writers. Satirical writing was less popular then (let’s say the few decades around the turn of the previous century) than it has been at other times. But it had its place. And comedy of all kinds, from the most slapsticky to the least, thrived and many, many people made cash from being funny.

It was a good time to have a sense of humour, and a good time to be able to write and draw.

Oliver Herford was not exactly unique. A lot of people tried to do what he did and some of them even succeeded. But very few managed what he did artistically: they were funny for a season, for a few years. They had songs that were widely sung or parodied. They influenced the shape and direction of graphic art, for a time. But Herford’s style, for all his overt characteristics (let’s call them wit and a certain elegance, what Americans might call class), was more adaptable than one might think. He lasted for many years, produced books and drawings on many subjects, and got rich. His obituaries were rich and decadent, like a good boiled pudding.

He satirised popular subjects (Peter Pan, par exemple) with some adeptness and a little cheek. He satirised famous people, of course, as was inevitable. Herford did a little of what Thackery did in The Book of Snobs, but much reduced in size, in his own Little Book of Bores.

(And isn’t the world just full of them, ladies and gentlemen? Bores. Isn’t it just a crime?)

Herford also wrote a lot of daintier, softer works, of the kind that seems, like some passages in Dickens seem, quite overly sentimental to modern ears. His drawings of delicate little kittens gambolling around, and his poems about them seeking saucers of milk and causing gentle chaos, are only occasionally funny to me, a cold, vicious cynic. But I imagine if, when cut, you bleed melted chocolate or straight saccharine, you might think them just darling and so true.

Other Herford works are more ambiguous. They span time and place. From mythology to the ancient world to modernity. But Herford’s light on his feet. He does not hang about. And he does not con anyone into thinking they might ever actually be learning something. His books rattle on so quickly, and are so stuffed with pictures, that they go down like expensive sweets. Before you know it, you’ve finished another, and that can become an expensive habit. Not one that’s all too good for you.

I must say one other problem with reading too much Herford, in my mind, is the generation of a kind of envy. Envy of his economic situation; envy of his times.

Herford likely does not seem too groundbreaking to many of his modern readers, who could easily complain, as some physicists have been heard to do of Galileo, that he was certainly lucky to have been born so early and to have had so much easy stuff to discover or get there first. One may envy Herford the large market he had to address. Not everyone gets one, and he used his quite casually and well.

And one might also envy Herford his facility. The ease with which he makes unusual rhymes. The straightforwardness with which his lines obey him. How simple it all seems! And when you think that the man was illustrating himself, with great dexterity, in several styles (your thin, willowy line-drawings sometimes, and your big, heavy pictures of something over-elaborate and chocolate box the next), it does seem quite unfair that one man may be afforded that much talent. And the rest of us left with so little.