{"id":224,"date":"2023-04-16T13:10:02","date_gmt":"2023-04-16T13:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/po\/?p=224"},"modified":"2024-04-15T18:57:04","modified_gmt":"2024-04-15T18:57:04","slug":"pop-up-humor-from-wilmot-robertson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/po\/literary\/pop-up-humor-from-wilmot-robertson\/","title":{"rendered":"Popcult Humor with Wilmot Robertson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Popcult Humor from Wilmot Robertson<\/strong><\/p>\n

Remembering Wilmot Robertson
\n(April 16, 1915 \u2013 July 8, 2005)<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Margot Metroland <\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the early 1980s I was involved with the startup of a “humor magazine” that never went anywhere after its colorful-but-vague pilot issue. Apart from a couple of National Lampoon<\/em> veterans, we were mostly post-collegiate types, full of quirky, off-the-wall ideas from our own days at colorful-but-vague college humor mags. It was around this time that one of my colleagues mentioned, as a bit of curious arcana, that he had heard<\/em> that somewhere<\/em> out there was a racist humor magazine<\/em>.<\/p>\n

No! You don’t say!<\/em> I said. Or something like that. I didn’t ask the magazine’s name because that would have been showing untoward interest. Furthermore, the colleague in question was the same guy whose mother raised her kids to believe that if you bought Welch’s Grape Juice you were funding the John Birch Society<\/a>. Thus he was a great source of whimsical urban legends with little to back them up.<\/p>\n

Knowing the name of the periodical was beside the point. The point was that this rumor existed, and that notion was funny in itself, because you could just imagine what sort of wild, rancid crap might be in there. It’s like today when you tell aging midwits that there are White Nationalist media outlets out there, and they go, “Oh! Stormfront<\/em>?” Something they heard about twenty-five years ago but would never want to investigate further. They have an idea what it\u2019s all about, and that\u2019s good enough for them.<\/p>\n

In this case the unnamed “racist humor magazine” was presumably Instauration<\/em>, and the rumored “humor” must have referred mostly to its silly\/incisive\/tiresome cartoons of Willie and Marv. (Willie was a gloriously afro’d 1970s negro holding a boombox, while Marv was a snide, stoop-shouldered Jew in a cardigan.) A few years later, after my startup humor rag was long dead and buried, I ended up contributing odd cartoons and text squibs to Instauration\u2014<\/em>just to keep my hand in, you know. <\/em>A little later, editor Wilmot Robertson retired the by now very dated Willie and Marv.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, I can’t think of an awful lot of straight-up funny business going on in the pages of that beloved magazine. Overt attempts at humor were mostly snarly and leaden. For example, the snooty-bitch “society column” written by someone calling himself Cholly Knickerbocker, serving up plausible-looking newsbriefs mixed in with off-color fantasies about miscegenation, AIDS, Jewish supremacy and other variants in degeneracy.<\/p>\n

Or the November 1983 cover photo of Anthony Blunt, former knight, former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures\u2014sweetly captioned OLD FAG ANTHONY BLUNT<\/strong>, Of Stalin\u2019s Snobbish Spy Network.<\/p>\n

Confusingly enough, two issues later our cover boy was Michael Whitney Straight, \u201cMajority Renegade of the Year.\u201d Scion to wealth and onetime Cambridge Red, Straight\u2019s main claim to fame, or greatest sin, was that he was the one who shopped his old friend Sir Anthony to the American and British intelligence services. (But surely that was a good thing<\/em>?)<\/p>\n

Like the quasi-Leftist critic Dwight Macdonald, Instauration<\/em> had a reverence for High Culture, particularly that which was somewhat obscure. No room here for kitsch<\/em>, or Macdonald\u2019s \u201cMasscult and Midcult.\u201d If there was an article about sculpture, it would probably be on Praxiteles\u2014or, better yet, Arno Breker! If Instauration<\/em> had a composer on its cover, it might be Carl Orff\u2014who, it was emphasized, stayed put in National Socialist Germany and didn\u2019t run off to Hollywood. Or perhaps Percy Grainger, another \u201cfolkish\u201d composer, one who specialized in writing pastiches of Morris dances and Irish reels.<\/p>\n

This leaden stuff is why the letters pages, known as \u201cThe Safety Valve,\u201d were such must<\/em> reading and remain so today. You got big laughs, lots of venom, and\u2014best of all\u2014occasional mention of things that were happening in the present-day Real World. Movies and TV and sometimes even sportsball. Pop culture.<\/p>\n

From what I knew of Wilmot Robertson, the ventings excerpted in \u201cThe Safety Valve\u201d were more reflective of his personality than most of what appeared in the magazine. The fact is, people who wrote for Instauration<\/em> didn\u2019t have much to say about popular culture because they didn\u2019t follow it or read about it. Mainly they read things like\u2026well, like Instauration<\/em>\u2026and heavy tomes on history or philosophy. But ever once in a while, a discussion of old-time showbiz or society personalities would find its way into the magazine.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite exchanges with W.R. concerned the late, great Ethel Merman. Now, especially in her latter years (that would be anytime after about 1940) she had a memorable look and loud, brassy personality. Because of that, and the fact that her real name was Ethel Zimmerman, a naive person could easily assume that she was Jewish. But, of course, she was not. Merman\u2019s ancestry was Scots and German, going way back, and she was raised in a churchgoing Episcopalian household. On the other hand, Wikipedia informs me that when young she modeled her voice and persona on Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice, amongst others, thus she was deliberately molding herself in that direction, not Doin\u2019 What Comes Naturally. So, maybe so.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I shot a little note off to Instauration<\/em> and got back a reply (was it a letter or phone call?) from the man himself. \u201cMadame,\u201d W.R. said, drawing himself up to his full 6\u20192\u201d height (or so I imagined), \u201cif there is an archetypal Jewess anywhere, it is most definitely<\/em> Ethel Merman.\u201d A few weeks later a longer, less jocose reply appeared in the magazine\u2019s \u201cSafety Valve\u201d letters section (June 1986).<\/p>\n

It turns out I had actually written in to correct a columnist who\u2019d referred to the late, great Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich as Jewish, and I tossed in Ethel Merman as another example of the same misapprehension.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So far as high-class popular-culture criticism goes, it\u2019s hard to beat \u201cKing Cole<\/a>,\u201d a beguiling analysis of Cole Porter\u2019s musical oeuvre that appeared in Instauration<\/em>, August 1977.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Majority composer who never sold out.\u201d That’s the kicker.<\/p>\n

The author briefly alludes to Cole\u2019s often louche and debauched private life, but he puts it in the context of the times, beginning with an expatriate life in the midst of people like the Murphys and Fitzgeralds:<\/p>\n

Porter was a member, at home and abroad, of various, and admittedly somewhat dissolute, “sets.” What would have made him a phenomenon in any group was his dedication to composing. Even in the early 1920s, when he affected the outward lifestyle of an expatriate playboy, he was working hard; and he had some success in Paris in 1923 with his score for a modernistic ballet\u2014since revived\u2014Within the Quota<\/em>. (The settings and story line were provided by Gerald Murphy, who had been Porter’s friend and sponsor at Yale. A truly archetypal expatriate, Murphy was also a friend to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and served as a model for the hero of the latter’s 1934 novel, Tender Is the Night<\/em>.) Deciding that his metier<\/em> was writing songs for the musical theater\u2014 he had long been “crazy” about Gilbert and Sullivan\u2014Porter steeled himself to deal with its minority entrepreneurs and set to work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Minority entrepreneurs.<\/em> Well, you know what that<\/em> means. For most of the previous century, popular-song writing and publishing had been dominated by second-, third-, fourth-generation Ulster Scots and Irishmen like Dan Emmet, Stephen Collins Foster, Harrigan & Hart, Chauncey Olcott, George M. Cohan, Walter Donaldson. But by the 1920s, Tin Pan Alley\u2014an actual place, a block of West 28th St.\u2014had gained quite a different cast. In that context Cole Porter’s work was inevitably unique, rather weird in fact. With his Gilbert and Sullivan influence, he tended to default to complicated patter songs and “catalog” numbers that recited an endless litany of people and places. (E.g.<\/em>, “Chinks do it, Japs do it, Up in Lapland little Lapps do it”; or, “You\u2019re the top! You\u2019re the great Houdini! You\u2019re the top! You\u2019re Mussolini!”)<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the topic of showtunes, in the November 1999 issue <\/a>we get an incisive, if somewhat sour, takedown of Irving Berlin<\/a>, a one-man schmaltz-and-standards machine for a half century. Instead of laboring over unusual key shifts and Gilbert & Sullivan-style patter songs about society, Berlin kept his melodies simple and singable, usually in the pop-standard key of E-flat, which happened to be the only key Berlin himself could play. (The author here, \u201cWolfgang Keller,\u201d garbles that factoid to say that Berlin composed all his songs on the black keys!) And Berlin kept his lyrics firmly aimed at the cheap seats. I find this passage particularly hilarious:<\/p>\n

His 1913 song, “Snooky-Ookums,” is an example of the sort of tripe he was churning out at the time: \u201cShe\u2019s his jelly elly roll\/ He\u2019s her sugar ugey bowl.\u201d Presaging the inanities of MTV-style music videos, his 1946 musical, Annie Get Your Gun,<\/em> featuring noisy Jewess Ethel Merman, had virtually nothing in common with any true form of musical theater. In its original production it had no discernible story-line and was more like a series of unrelated vaudeville sketches than anything else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Oh look! It\u2019s that erroneous Ethel Merman trope again!<\/em>)<\/p>\n

As to the issue of Annie Get Your Gun<\/em>\u2019s disjointed plot structure, this was because Berlin was under the gun to crank out a bunch of rollicking songs, very quickly<\/em>, for a proposed Annie Oakley musical that was due to be mounted in a few months, but which so far had a very sketchy book. It seems the perpetually busy Rodgers and Hammerstein had been sought out originally to do the music and libretto, but they hadn’t the time. But they agreed to produce this spindly notion of a show, though someone else would have to write the songs.<\/p>\n

And so they called in…Jerome Kern…finest melodist of his time…to do the score for Annie Get Your Gun<\/em>. But then Kern dropped dead! Truly. Right there on the sidewalk! A brain hemorrhage.<\/p>\n

What a cursed production!<\/p>\n

Last-gasp step: they brought in Irving Berlin, who thereupon cranked out \u201cNo Business Like Show Business\u201d and a few other standards in a couple of days, the way you or I might slap together a cheese-and-cracker board. The whole production often looked like a mistake, but with all these last-minute efforts it became a money-maker, a bountiful hit. Critics panned it for having little plot and being little more than a collocation of hummable songs…but it’s songs that live on and on, not drama.<\/p>\n

Now we move onto something that was supposed to be a shocker in 1984: The Cecil Beaton Scandal of 1938<\/a>. This was derived from Caroline Seebohm\u2019s recently published The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Cond\u00e9 Nast. <\/em>Irving Berlin peeps in again here, or rather his wife Ellin Mackay does, in tiny scrawled rumblings about society figures, in Beaton’s wonderfully amateurish pen-and-ink drawings.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What was scandalous about these illustrations was that they showed newspapers filled with gossipy columns about Hollywood and society “kikes,” as Beaton called them. (“Mr. R. Andrew\u2019s Ball at the El Morocco brought out all the damned kikes in town.”) <\/em>Beaton had penned in these remarks in minuscule letters, so small that one might need a magnifying glass to read them.<\/p>\n

This February 1938 issue of Vogue<\/em> was already out on the stands before someone spotted Beaton’s prank. Walter Winchell screamed about it in his own gossip column, and then the house fell down on Cecil Beaton. Cond\u00e9 Nast himself sadly called him in and fired him.<\/p>\n

One of the few all-out popcult endorsements from Instauration<\/em> came in 1988, a couple of years after The Bonfire of the Vanities<\/em> was published. FOUR-STAR SATIRE! it was called.<\/p>\n

It’s not top criticism, but a very favorable review of the Tom Wolfe book, and one of the few notices Instauration<\/em> ever gave to contemporary bestsellers. You should read it here<\/a>, though maybe not if you’ve read the actual novel. Because it’s impossibly naive and silly. An accurate picture of “Zoo City,” Robertson rejoices, not having been in New York for many decades, but gleefully imagining it from his perch in Frog Hollow, North Carolina. Except that it was the city Tom Wolfe had chosen to live in, and had spent most of his life in. Surely a town with a Tom Wolfe can\u2019t be all that bad.<\/p>\n

For a while it seemed Tom Wolfe had written the Great American Novel. Then the movie came out, and it was supposedly a stinker, and people didn’t rave about the book anymore.<\/p>\n

This was not Tom Wolfe\u2019s first appearance in Instauration<\/em>. He was in the very first issue in 1975. The subject of a cover story, in fact, about his book on modern art criticism, The Painted Word<\/em>. Headlined \u201cBerg, Berg and Berg,\u201d<\/a> the article wittily summarizes the story of how Abstract Expressionism and other nonsensical art fads of the 1940s, 50s and 60s were encouraged among painters and imposed upon the public by three critics, all Jewish, named Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg. Almost certainly, this review was<\/em> written by Wilmot Robertson himself. But, like Wolfe, Robertson leaves out the interesting but inconvenient fact that the real progenitor of this venture, the political theorist who goaded Greenberg and others to propagandize for obscurantism in modern art, was a non-Jew and non-art critic I\u2019ve mentioned before: Dwight Macdonald. Macdonald wasn\u2019t being destructive or mischievous; he\u2019d just come to regard most representational art as old-hat, \u201cMasscult\u201d stuff, stuff that pandered to the public. Too much Grant Wood, Norman Rockwell, Thomas Hart Benton. Macdonald wanted High Art, and that to him meant basically inaccessible. But that\u2019s another story for another time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Popcult Humor from Wilmot Robertson Remembering Wilmot Robertson (April 16, 1915 \u2013 July 8, 2005)   Margot Metroland   In the early 1980s I was involved with the startup of a “humor magazine” that never went anywhere after its colorful-but-vague pilot issue. Apart from a couple of National Lampoon veterans, we were mostly post-collegiate types, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[22],"tags":[84,83,82],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/po\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/po\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/po\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/po\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/po\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/po\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":295,"href":"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/po\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions\/295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/po\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/po\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gallerynews.com\/po\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}