Automobile. A vehicle which ought to move, but frequently can’t. 

Brevity. A desirable quality in the Fourth of July oration but not in the fireworks. 

Credulity. A feminine virtue and a masculine vice. 

These misfired jokes make a little more sense when you know they are from 1904, when they were included in The Foolish Dictionary. It was the work of Gideon Wurdz, better known to the public of his time as Charles Wayland Towne, a writer for the New York Times. 

I came across Wurdz’s little lexicon recently while in pursuit of an old textbook. I sought the textbook because I wanted to add to my evidence of what the nation once considered important for children to learn. But what once prompted the nation to laugh may also be a worthy topic. It turns out to have its own specialists.

What little is known about the life of Charles Wayland Towne, aka Gideon Wurdz, comes from Steve Carper, an aficionado of humor and old books, who has filled his house with thousands of volumes on the topic. Carper hopes to bring back to life the “almost totally forgotten” works “written to make people laugh.” It’s a quixotic enterprise in the full sense of that word. Most of those forgotten works are forgotten for good reason. They are not especially funny. Their value today is mostly as telescopes to long-gone popular culture.

But Carper did his research. He names Wurdz as “the most forgotten of my Forgotten Humorists,” which says something. Carper’s catalog of obscure funnymen goes on beyond Groucho to men and women who haven’t raised a ripple of laughter for over a century, if then. But Wurdz isn’t one of them. His Foolish Dictionary sold 193,000 copies, or so he said, and he went on to write sequels, The Foolish Almanack, Foolish Finance, Eediotic Etiquette, and a later edition of The Foolish Dictionary. So we have to believe that Wurdz was something like the David Sedaris or Tina Fey of the Teddy Roosevelt era. It’s best that I pause and provide more examples of his side-splitting humor.

He defines conscience as “the fear of being found out”; rhetoric as “language in a dress suit”; and philosophy as “something that enables the rich to say there is no disgrace in being poor.” Wurdz was fond of puns: fakir, “a false reporter”; Bowery, “a shady retreat in New York”; and a crow as “a bird that never complains without caws.” 

His jests about women and the relations between the sexes are often painful: spinster, “An ember from which the sparks have flown”; woman, “an aspiring creature whose political sphere is still slightly flattened at the polls”; and miracle, “a woman who won’t talk.” His book also has a current of ethnic and racial harshness, whose verdict can stand without examples.

Some humor stands the test of time, but much of it doesn’t. It is by no means easy to predict what will survive. The Civil War humorist David Ross Locke, who wrote as Petroleum V. Nasby, has disappeared from sight, though once a favorite of Lincoln, who occasionally read Nasby’s satiric letters to his cabinet. Locke was a determined foe of slavery, but his instrument was Petroleum, an ignorant racist who wrote in hillbilly English. I have a copy of his Ekkoes from Kentucky, with illustrations by Thomas Nast, which is definitely not for today’s readers. Still, he made Lincoln laugh. I see that a recent reprint of Ekkoes confuses Locke with his contemporary, the great cartoonist Thomas Nast.

Wurdz stands comparison with the far better-known Ambrose Bierce, critic, editor, journalist, and prolific short story writer, who spent years writing occasional newspaper and magazine columns in which he offered facetious definitions of common words. Bierce often jabbed at conventional morality and traded in raw cynicism:

Bierce: Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two. 

Bierce: Husband. One who, having dined, is charged with care of the plate 

Wurdz: Husband, The next thing to a wife 

Bierce: History, n.: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools 

Wurdz: History. The evil that men do 

In 1906, Bierce compiled some of his definitions into The Cynic’s Word Book.

In 1911, he bestowed its current title, The Devil’s Dictionary, and expanded the text. The devil may have expressed his gratitude two years later when Bierce, hoping to meet Pancho Villa, ventured into Mexico, where he fell uncharacteristically silent.

Unlike Wurdz, Bierce has never been forgotten. His jests were pointed and in some fashion eloquent. Bierce defined my field—ethnology—as “the science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots, and ethnologists.” His politics were even-handed. He defined a conservative as “a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.”

The Devil’s Dictionary is well known and remains in print.

Wordplay in the form of satiric definitions was nothing new in the early 1900s. Samuel Johnson, for example, defined a patron as “a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.” Gustave Flaubert’s posthumous Dictionary of Received Ideas (1913) also satirizes social pretentions. He defines idiots as “those who do not think like you.”

As I said, Carper, who seeks to rescue the reputation of Wurdz, has cast a wider net, hoping to salvage virtually all the works (at least in English) “written to make people laugh.” He seems to believe that the laughs will naturally follow the jokes, but you cannot make people laugh at out-of-date banalities.

Yet we have so many humorists who outlast most of time’s cruelties. This seems especially true of silent comedians—Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and many others. Hollywood’s “screwball comedies” (Bringing Up Baby, It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, etc.)—likewise have proved durable. But most comedy melts faster than a popsicle on a hot summer sidewalk.

The laugh sometimes comes because the joke is truly timeless; alternatively, the joke is entirely in the moment and will be gone by tomorrow; or yet again the humor is in the person who performs it. Some humorists sustain whole careers by their distinctive personas. They become part of a generation’s view of itself. The Marx Brothers, Will Rogers, Gracie Allen, Milton Berle, Lucille Ball, Johnny Carson, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld, Tina Fey—each belongs to a particular extended moment, in which they embody the irreverence of a generation shrugging off social taboos. 

But that’s not Charles Wayland Towne/Gideon Wurdz. He was a firefly of jester’s trade.

I have to admit that I find something heartening about the short-lived nature of such celebrity, which I take as a pretty good prediction of much of what currently passes as grand accomplishment in contemporary American arts and letters.

Will the 1619 Project last as long as The Foolish Dictionary? Or will some future Steve Carper explain a century hence why Nikole Hannah-Jones once commanded so much attention? 

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