The Pittsburgh Press (February 16, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SAN FRANCISCO – Well, what do you know about this! Here we are in San Francisco again. If I’m not careful I’ll get to calling San Francisco home instead of Albuquerque or Indiana or Washington, D.C. Maybe I just better ask for bids.
In addition to torrents of rain and the keys to the city, I was welcomed here by a large batch of mail. On the whole the mail was nice and the writers wished me much health, happiness and wealth. I go for that wealth stuff.
However, there were a few letters which made me feel bad. It seems some people are being wracked by an indignant concern over the apparent disintegration of this noted author’s moral fiber. So perhaps a futile explanation is due them.
You know that cooking column I wrote from Albuquerque a few months ago. The one in which we took up a collection from the guests to buy flowers for the delivery boy who broke his leg (although there wasn’t any delivery boy and he didn’t break his leg). And I said that instead of buying flowers I took the money and bought whisky with it.
Well, that seems to have upset several people. That I could be such a rat as to buy whisky with that money! One woman even consigned me not too gently to Purgatory.
What astounds me is that people apparently have taken to believing everything they see in this column. Why, I’ve been writing fantasies like that for seven years, and nobody ever got so serious about it before. Older readers know quite well that occasionally I get my tongue caught in my cheek and can’t get it out.
Humor backfires in wartime
So I’ll draw those disgruntled readers a picture of that nasty whisky-buying episode. No such incident ever happened. I made it all up. I thought everybody would know that when they read it.
No collection was ever taken to buy flowers for the delivery boy who didn’t exist. And I did not buy whisky with the money that wasn’t collected. All the world knows that I don’t buy whisky. What I actually bought was a trainload of burros, all named Pete.
Now, everybody happy?
It does seem to me, as a man with his finger on the nation’s pulse as they say, that there has been an altering of public reception to humor-attempts since the war started.
Take me. I’m a humorist, as everybody knows. I’ve been laughing hysterically at my own stuff for years. I have no proof that anybody else ever did. but at least my occasional efforts at wit never brought the firing squad to my door.
Yet since Pearl Harbor it seems to me that some folks have deliberately set out to misunderstand what they read. I’ve actually had the recent experience of being raised by one reader to the status of a traitor because of a line I thought was harmlessly funny. Light-heartedness is ticklish business these days.
The New Yorker magazine recently had a little essay on this subject. They are worried, too. They likened wit to the hand grenades of the last war, where you pulled the fuse, counted four, and let fly at the enemy.
Gloom will live for a day
A dozen little things could happen to cause you to blow yourself to smithereens, instead of your audience, the Germans. That’s what is happening now to humorists and cartoonists. The New Yorker says:
It is too tough a job for the average humorist to determine which of his writings are likely to bolster the national morale and which are likely to give comfort to the enemy (and, I might add, discomfort to himself).
The old-fashioned idea that laughter is always a healthy catharsis is too firmly imbedded in him, and his estimate of the public’s ability to disentangle irony is, generally speaking, much too optimistic.”
So, as far as I am concerned, a gay touch isn’t worth the struggle any longer. Down with humor for the duration, I say. Long live gloom, if that’s the way it has to be. Hereafter when something funny pops into my head. I’ll just lock the door and laugh traitorously to myself.
Maybe I’ll change my mind tomorrow, though.
I have a friend here who went to enlist in the Air Corps. He passed the physical and mental tests easily, but they wouldn’t take him – because he bit his nails! Guess they figured it indicated he was too nervous.
However, they did say that if he’d come back in a week with unbitten nails, they’d take him. So my friend summoned up all his will power, went for a week without biting a nail, returned to the recruiting office, and was accepted.
Gleefully he rushed back to the office where the worked, and started telling the boys that he had been taken. The boys gathered around and congratulated him, and then one of them said: “But what’s the matter with your fingernails?”
Everybody looked, including my friend. And discovered that he had bitten all his nails clear down to the quick on his way back from the recruiting office!