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Thoughts Too Short
The following question was raised by Marketing/Research guru Josh Jordan on Twitter recently: “What person (celebrity, politician, writer, etc) from pre-Twitter days would’ve been an insanely great follow had they been able to tweet?”
The one name that kept popping up was Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), the acid-tongued lady of the Algonquin Round Table fame. Parker, whose most famous quip was probably “What fresh hell is this?” was once asked to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence and she replied, “You can lead a ‘horticulture’ but you can’t make her think.”
Of one woman whose sexual appetite was legendary she said, “That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can’t say ‘No’ in any of them.” If that isn’t worthy of modern Twitter I don’t know what is.
Parker’s biggest shortcoming was her politics. She embraced Communism in the 1930s and eventually found herself on the Hollywood studios blacklist. Hollywood has been in love with her ever since.
Other names that I came up with were her Vicious Circle compatriots, Robert Benchley (whose grandson Peter would go on to write Jaws), playwright Charles MacArthur (The Front Page), and Franklin P. Adams (The Conning Tower). I also included radio satirist Fred Allen, sports columnist John Kieran and pianist Oscar Levant.*
Levant will be in the news sometime in the next couple of years when Doris Day, now age 96, passes away. It was he who infamously said, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”
I thought maybe Bob Hope would be good at it, and most definitely all of Bob Hope’s writers. (I mean, Tweets are nothing more than really, really small cue cards, right?)
Who would you throw on to the list?
*Levant, Adams and Kieran would form the cornerstone of the classic radio quiz show Information Please for over a decade. Episodes can be found here.
Published in Culture
How embarrassing, I almost forgot to add Tom Lehrer to my list.
My dad had all his albums! So funny!
Allen’s fights with Jack Benny were brilliant.
Fred Allen: “Jack, you couldn’t ad lib a belch after a plate of Hungarian goulash.”
Jack Benny: “You wouldn’t say that if my writers were here.”
@jameslileks Allen didn’t own a dog. But that got printed in one of the New York papers the day after his fatal heart attack and it’s taken on a life of its own. He did die on West 57th where he strolled regularly on Saturday nights. He was to be a panelist the next night on What’s My Line?
Allen was married to his vaudeville partner Portland Hoffa. Her parents had three children, Portland, her sister Lebanon and brother Harlem. Guess where mama was when she had each one of her kids?
I’d love to see Bob (Elliott) & Ray (Goulding) on Twitter.
François de La Rochefoucauld
As it is the mark of great minds to say many things in a few words, so it is that of little minds to use many words to say nothing.
I’d probably go with Dorothy Parker as my first choice too. “If all the girls at the Yale prom were laid end to end I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
But. Samuel Johnson.
And perhaps my favorite (although it’s a close-run thing):
And so on.
Steve Allen.
Paul Lynde
Twain:
Spike Milligan:
Dick Cavett told a story of arriving in New York in the mid-1950s and seeing Allen coming out of the studio following an episode of “What’s My Line?” on a rainy night shortly before his death:
Along the lines of one of my late dear mother’s own sayings: “Money might not make you happy, but at least you can be miserable in comfort.”
Crichton.
George Carlin would’ve rocked Twitter, I think.
Allen was a East Coast man. “California is a fine place,” he said, “if you happen to be an orange.” He was one of the few prime time radio comedians who remained based in New York.
The only thing David Sarnoff and Bill Paley (the heads of NBC and CBS respectively) ever agreed on was the need to combat prerecorded programming because it threatened their business model. That meant separate live feeds to each coast. Allen’s 2nd show was always after 11pm ET and network pages often had to pull homeless people off the streets to sit in the audience. It so disgusted Allen that he would do the entire show with his back to the auditorium. But the bums loved it, especially during the winter.
Evelyn Waugh would have been a “follow,” except for the problem that his barbed tweets would likely have been aimed at the concept of Twitter and those (including himself) who used it.
W. C. Fields.
A woman drove me to drink and I didn’t even have the decency to thank her.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.
I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.
Many more.
Groucho
Tweets from Harpo Marx or Marcel Marceau?
” !”
Catherine Winkworth:
Yogi Berra? Although the origins of many of his sayings are disputed, there’s no doubt he popularized them:
And then my other favorite, which wasn’t Yogi Berra at all, but rather Wee Willie Keeler, and which I think is always good advice, not only in baseball, but also in life:
(To be perfectly fair, I have no idea if he ever said anything else even half as good, but that might be worth a spot just on its own.)
PS: And thus, with only two-and-a-half months to go, I have used up my entire allocation of “sports” comments for the year.
Sports comments? Yogi Berra is one of America’s greatest philosophers.
I shot sporting clays today, and shot them where they weren’t. I didn’t do very well.