Harold Wallace Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker, who occupied the editor’s chair from 1925 until 1951, designed the magazine to be a blend of seriousness and humor. He announced in his first column, on February 21, 1925, that The New Yorker starts with a declaration of serious purpose but with a concomitant declaration that it will not be too serious in executing it. It hopes to reflect metropolitan life, to keep up with the events and affairs of the day, to be gay, humorous, satirical but to be more than a jester.¹

The magazine proved so "gay, humorous, satirical" in the very first issue that Ross remarked one week later, somewhat abashed:

The claim for the serious was undoubtedly a ruse in part. James Thurber later stated that Ross’s basic intent was to give The New Yorker "an offhand, chatty, informal quality."³ When we consider the fact that Ross hired the likes of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Alexander Woolcott, E. B. White, Ogden Nash, Clarence Day, Arthur Kober, Phyllis McGinley, and Clifton Fadiman as writers, and cartoonists Helen Hokinson, Peter Arno, William Steig, Mary Petty, Whitney Darrow, Charles Addams, George Price, Saul Steinburg, and of course Thurber again, there is little doubt that he really wanted to steer the ship along sunny shores. What he did, as Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill have pointed out, was to found "the recherché magazine that was to influence chic American humor for a half-century"⁴ and establish a tone and mode that constitute an undeniable New Yorker brand of humor—witty, droll, lively of style, and appropriately urbane. That all the writers and cartoonists seemed to fall under the magazine’s spell is a tribute to the ruling passion and editorial guidance of Ross. He was a taskmaster, a perfectionist, and at times an exasperating man to work for, but at the same time he was a boss who went to bat for his people and hastened to make amends if he ever felt he had treated them unjustly. Once when Thurber had lost his temper over a peevish remark Ross made to him and told his editor "what to do with his daddam magazine," Ross broke out in laughter, took Thurber for after-work drinks, and apologized by explaining, "I’m sorry, Thurber, I’m married to this magazine. It’s all I think about." Thurber later recalled, "That night was the

beginning of our knowledge of each other underneath the office make-up, and of a lasting and deepening friendship."⁵

This special issue of the "Humor of The New Yorker, 1925–1950" focuses on those Ross years, the golden years when the magazine boasted of a host of impressive stars who helped Ross attain his goals, especially achieving that lightness of tone and vitality of subject he so desired. Of the articles that follow, the first four deal with the major figures who more than any other writers shaped the style, subject matter, and tone of The New Yorker: Thurber, E. B. White, Benchley, and Perelman. In "Thurber and the New Yorker," Steven H. Gale traces the steps of Thurber’s association with the magazine and his friendship with Ross, discusses his distinctive style, and comments on some of Thurber’s most representative prose pieces and cartoons that illuminated the magazine’s pages. Thomas Grant, in "The Sparrow on the Ledge: E. B. White in New York," profiles the man who became the cornerstone of Ross’s staff, the magazine’s "best detail man, most prolific staffer and, over the years, just about the magazine’s most versatile contributor." Grant cleverly compares White as essayist to his favorite New York subject, the sparrow: both explore and flit about New York, discovering the secrets and drama of the great city. As time passed and the city grew, what it lost is symbolized by the vanishing nests.

Benchley’s New Yorker writings of the 1930s are the subject of Eric Solomon’s provocative essay, "Notes Towards a Definition of Robert Benchley’s 1930’s New Yorker Humor." Examining in some depth Benchley’s Wayward Press commentaries (delightful attacks on American newspaper reportage) and his famous drama reviews in which he is "at once the clear, acute critic and the warm, discursive humorist," Solomon reaches some telling conclusions about these critical components of the Benchley canon. Sanford Pinsker shows in "S. J. Perelman: A Portrait of the Artist as an Aging New Yorker Humorist" that Perelman was a versatile and successful writer in many settings, including Hollywood and Broadway, but "his most congenial turf" was the pages of The New Yorker where his eye "could operate at full, comic advantage." He concludes that Perelman was something of an anomaly in that he aged so well in his writing, maintaining his earlier persona rather than assuming a different voice in his later years.

New Yorker writers were not all stars of the Thurber-Benchley ilk, of course, and Louis Hasley in "Hyman Kaplan Revisited" reminds us of the importance of the minor, but essential, humorists to the overall effect and success of the magazine. The Kaplan stories, antics of a recalcitrant immigrant who turns a night English class into an unforgettable experience for all involved, were an immensely popular series in The New Yorker. Hasley posits that Kaplan, the creation of Leo C. Rosten (pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross), ranks as one of the six "outstanding humorous characters in our century." Of course, The New Yorker has

always been known as much for its cartoons as its humorous fiction. M. Thomas Inge explores the achievements of the magazine in the area of graphic humor. He traces the influence of Editor Ross on the unique brand of cartoon humor in the magazine, then examines the artistry of Thurber, Hokinson, Arno, Addams, and others in support of his thesis that the magazine has "profoundly influenced the development of the American gag cartoon and established the standards against which the works of all modern practicing cartoonists are measured." Whether the writers or the cartoonists are the reader’s main cup of tea, grouped all together under Ross’s tutelage they effected a "tone" in The New Yorker during those twenty-five years that became standard. That distinctive tone is the subject of Don Hausdorff’s essay. Comparing the magazine to other humorous and critical journals of the times, Hausdorff defines, analyzes, and exemplifies that "uniform tone." Among other things, he concludes, the magazine "minimized the helter-skelter effects borrowed from the humor magazines. And it shied away from the iconoclastic manner of the American Mercury." Above all, it emphasized "moderation, in an almost eighteenth-century spirit, in all things."

The New Yorker is about to enter its sixtieth year of publication. Only two editors, Ross and currently William Shawn, have charted its course since the magazine’s inception. The Ross years saw the rise of many illustrious authors and graphic artists who carved out for the magazine a permanent niche in the history of American Magazines and popular humor. Ross stated in only his second column that The New Yorker might not do a lot for the magazine world; in fact, he was not sure that it should. But he did promise his readers that "if we ever run out of things to say, just for the fun of saying them, we expect to close up this little playhouse and go to work." It is obvious, in looking back at the classic period of the magazine, the Ross years, that it continued to have much to say. And with the likes of Thurber, White, Benchley, Perelman, Leonard Q. Ross, and the cartoonists doing the saying or portraying, how could it miss? Ross may not have wanted his creation "to be taken as a humorous magazine. Being funny when you don’t feel like it is like editing the Nation when you are feeling good."⁷ But in spite of itself, the magazine cultivated a humorous vein in that first twenty-five years that has endured.

This issue concludes with a bibliography of S. J. Perelman’s short essays, prepared by Sarah Toombs. This great number of Perelman’s pieces that appeared in The New Yorker is all the more convincing of the importance of Ross’s magazine to the careers of major humorists such as Perelman. It is my hope that focusing attention on the humorous tradition of The New Yorker in this special edition of Studies in American Humor will prompt even further appreciation and understanding of the dimension that the magazine has added to twentieth-century American humor in general.

Notes

    ¹"Of All Things," The New Yorker, 21 February 1925, p. 2.
    ² "Of All Things," The New Yorker, 28 February 1925, p. 6.
    ³The Years With Ross (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1957), p. 13.
    ⁴America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (Oxford, New York, Toronto,
Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 417.
    ⁵The Years With Ross, pp. 15–16.
    ⁶28 February 1925, p. 7.
     ⁷Ibid.

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