The Art of Humor, with Calvin Trillin

I recently found this 1995 interview between George Plimpton and Kansas City native Calvin Trillin. It made me really happy, because I just like the idea of these two smart and able dudes sitting together and talking about things like their childhood and their favorite restaurants and all that.

Calvin Trillin, just a regular guy at the deli

In the piece, Trillin covers everything from the office atmosphere at The New Yorker to afternoon rendezvouses (is that the right plural?) in safe deposit rooms. It may be found here in its entirety, on the Paris Review website. The interview is in no way my personal property and I do not claim it as such, but I recommend it. Especially if you like humor or journalism or good things.

Here are a few highlights for the short-on-time:

INTERVIEWER

When did you realize that you were funny?

TRILLIN

At Sunday school when I was about eleven. We came to the part in the Bible or the Talmud, whichever it is, with the famous phrase, “If I forget thee, oh Yerushalayem, may my right hand lose its cunning and my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.” I stood up with my right hand gradually becoming noticeably weird and said: If I forget thee, O Yerushalayem, may my right hand lose its cunning and my tongue cleave to duh woof of my mout. Everybody laughed except the teacher, who ejected me from the classroom and accused me of self-hatred. A very weird epiphany. I guess I already knew I wasn’t a solemn little boy—shy, but not exactly solemn.
I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can’t get rid of. It’s odd: one of the questions that people ask me constantly is, Is it hard having to be funny all the time? The difficult thing for me is being serious. It’s a genetic thing—being funny—like being able to wiggle your ears. I don’t have any trouble being funny, that’s my turn of mind. Or at least attempting to be funny. Whether it really is funny is for the audience to judge. But I actually do think that some people are and some people aren’t. We all know, say, a lot of lawyers who aren’t funny and some who are. A lot of dentists who aren’t funny. The dentist who just took a fractured root out of my tooth—we refer to him as the butcher of Fifty-fourth Street—is a pleasant, friendly man, but he’s not funny.

INTERVIEWER

I would have thought most people who find themselves very funny early on think of themselves as potential stand-up comics or actors.

TRILLIN

If I had been raised in a different house, I might have done something like that. As it was, I was raised to be a kind of champion, sent out to make something of myself. My father, who was technically an immigrant—he came when he was an infant—wanted me to be an American, preferably an American president. He didn’t go to college. Before I was born he wanted me to go specifically to Yale, which he thought would help. It was easy for him to think I could be president: he didn’t have to worry about being president himself, being ineligible because he wasn’t born in the United States.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any explanations as to why there are so few women writers one thinks of as funny?

TRILLIN

Well, funny is obviously not one of the things women in this country have traditionally been expected to be. In the bad old days there was certainly a feeling that being funny was not feminine. I suppose the number of female stand-up comedians these days is an indication that this is changing. But if a girl in my Sunday school class had thought about pretending to take that passage about forgetting Jerusalem literally, I don’t think she would have stood up and put on the little performance. The female class cutup has not been a staple of American folklore. I don’t know whether or not that has meant that fewer women have felt encouraged about writing humor. There are, of course, some very funny women writers. Molly Ivins, for instance, writes about the characters in Texas politics better than anyone. She once mentioned a Texas gubernatorial candidate—this was a real candidate—who visited San Francisco and was so afraid of getting AIDS that when he took a shower in the hotel he wore shower hats on his feet.

...I really want to know who that gubernatorial candidate was.