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HOME SWEET HOME by Mordecai Richler; Knopf; 291 pages...
...this rich compendium, Novelist Mordecai Richler attempts to lift humorists out of the high chair and onto the Louis Quinze. He ransacks old collections and ranges through the century, from Stephen Leacock to Fran Lebowitz. Anything that smacks of adolescence is jettisoned: "You will meet with no Dorothy Parker here... I found her comic stories brittle, short on substance." And nothing mild is allowed: to go through Robert Benchley's work is "to discover a good many of his sketches astonishingly bland, disarmingly gentle." The 65 pieces that pass Richler's scrutiny are trenchant, acrimonious and sharp. Most...
...Richler's amusement park, the contributors often find themselves in a hall of mirrors. Southerner Roy Blount Jr. indignantly recalls that "one afternoon this African got up in my favorite class, Difficult Fiction, and denounced William Faulkner for his treatment of 'non-Western people.' " Peter De Vries weighs in with a brilliant Yoknapatawpha parody, then Kenneth Tynan lampoons Faulkner in his spoonbread rendition of Our Town: "Well, folks, reckon that's about it. End of another day in the city of Jefferson, Mississippi ... Couple of people got raped, couple more got their teeth kicked...
...witless complain that humor is impossible to write in an age when headlines are more absurd than the products of imagination. Richler's contemporary entries offer hilarious refutation. Excerpts from Stanley Elkin's The Dick Gibson Show and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint belong on the shelf with Rabelais and Swift. Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode stands as a classic. In it, a professor of humanities is propelled backward in time to the arms of Madame Bovary and the pages of a remedial Spanish textbook: "He was running for his life over...
...empathic look at a cleaning lady; Marshall Brickman's pastiche The Analytic Napkin is road company Woody Allen; Dan Greenburg's How to Be a Jewish Mother has aged so rapidly that it makes the paper beneath it look brown. But almost everything else functions well in Richler's idiosyncratic, exuberant and welcome volume. What does not work is a steady insistence that humorists are a devalued species. In fact they enjoy unique privileges: they can mock the powerful, conceal anguish with a joke and enjoy an afterlife in the pages of anthologies. Small wonder that...