From Dick Cavett to P.G. Wodehouse

I don't know much about Dick Cavett's career as a television talk show host but the highest compliment I can pay him in his latter incarnation as a columnist is that I have never read an article by him without wishing that it were longer.  He is spellbinding.

Here are a couple of stories he tells about Groucho Marx:

Groucho stories, even if you've heard them, are still good. Like the well-known story of his daughter and the restricted country club pool. Groucho: "But my daughter's only half-Jewish. Can she go in up to her waist?"

 Marx was once invited to attend a séance:

The séance was held in the darkened parlor of some wealthy believer's apartment. Groucho reported a heavy air of sanctity about the place, "and not entirely from the incense." Lights were low and the faithful conversed in hushed tones. The medium began to chant unintelligibly, and then to emit a strange humming sound (......), eventually achieving her trance state. "I am in touch, I am in touch with the Other Side," she intoned. Does anyone have a question?"

Groucho arose and asked, "What is the capital of North Dakota?"

Finally, he quotes from Woody Allen: "You cannot prove the nonexistence of God; you just have to take it on faith."

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How different this brand of American humour is from a certain kind of British comedy. In the writings of P.G. Wodehouse, for example, context and tone are everything.

In The Code of the Woosters, Bertie is discussing changes in the character of Gussie Fink-Nottle with a girlfriend.

" What kind of difference?" asks Bertie.

"An improvement, if such a thing were possible. Have you not sometimes felt in the past, Bertie, that, if Augustus had a fault, it was a tendency to be a little timid?"

"Oh, ah yes, of course, definitely. I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie. "A sensitive plant, what?"

"Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie."

"Oh, am I?" .............

That last line is sheer genius and one can picture Wodehouse laughing to himself as he thought of it.

And here is a somewhat risqué joke he recounts in a letter to his friend Guy Bolton in 1948:

Clergyman doing crossword puzzle. Clue "Appertaining to the female sex". He has got the last letters all right . . . u. n. t. He consults another clergyman, who says the word is "aunt". "Ah, yes, of course", says the first clergyman. "Would you mind lending me your eraser for a moment, my dear fellow."