The Coral Gables Times

I'd Rather Write Than Be President

BY MAX SHULMAN From the age of four it was write or bust, says the author of "Barefoot Boy With Cheek," "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" (1,500,000 copies), "Rally Round The Flag, Boys" DRAWINGS BY MIKE RAMUS AT THE BEGINNING all I knew was that I wanted to write . . . Correction: had to write. Nothing else would serve; nothing else beckoned. It was write or bust. So I wrote. From the age of four I scrawled verses and stories which have mercifully not been preserved. And I told stories. I wandered the neighborhood, a kind of Homer in knickers, telling tales to whoever would listen for as long as they would listen. I was born in St. Paul, Minn., on March 14, 1919, the son of poor but honest parents. My father was a house painter when he worked, which was scarcely at all between 1929 and 1939. My mother was a lady with an agile tongue and a conviction that the Depression was entirely my father's fault. Home life was not tranquil. When I was twelve I got a newspaper route. When I was fifteen I took up snooker and found a job driving a grocery truck. All the time I kept writing. I did stories and a column for the school paper and magazine, but mostly I wrote poems for the edification of my friends. Commemorative poems, you might call them. For example, my friends and I would spend a jolly evening ogling girls or shooting craps, and I would appear next day with a poem of thirty verses celebrating the event. Often these were set to traditional airs, suitable for four-part harmony. I know now why I wrote these poems. They gave me status in the gang. I had no money, no clothes, no car, no height, looks, athletic ability, fighting ability. All I had to separate me from the hangers-on was the ability to compose purple verses, and with these I bought prestige. I know now, too, why I turned early to humor as my branch of writing. The reason is simply that life was bitter and I was not. All around me was poverty and sordidness but I refused to see it that way. By turning it into jokes, I made it bearable. Today I write humor for quite another reason. Life today is sweet, not bitter, and comic distortion is no longer necessary to protect my bleeding ego. However, I have learned that comic distortion is a difficult and highly paid craft. Having gained this firm foothold in the durable joke business, I would be a fool to leave it now and start as an apprentice in some other department of writing. Let me hasten to add that I do not consider that I have mastered the humor business. I don't think I'll live that long. I am learning constantly—not just ancillary bits and pieces to add to my main body of knowledge, but big important concepts that sometimes sweep out and replace what I had previously regarded as basic principles. For instance, I had always thought that the joke was the building block of humor, but today I know that the joke is the enemy of humor. Jokes piled end on end—and I have done it; oh brother, have I done it!—do not make a work of humor. Humor is not jokes; it is reality, it is familiarity, it is identifiability seen through a comic lens. To construct a humorous work, you do not compound incongruities; [?]ou tell a story—a serious story about real people—and you infuse it with the comic spirit. TO GET BACK to biographical matters, I entered the University of Minnesota when I was 17. I was still shooting pool and chasing ridiculous girls and writing lyrics, and so I flunked out in my freshman year. I spent the next year working in a grocery store. The hours were so long that [?]ny nights I was too tired to go out on the town with my buddies. So I started reading books. That did it. Books rekindled my literary drive. The next year I returned to the University and this time it took. I got my B.A. in 1942. College was for me a time of such happiness that today I'm still writing about it. In college I met the girl who is now my wife, I made friends who are still my friends. And I wrote. I [?] a humor column on the student daily. I worked four years on the campus humor magazine and ended up as editor.