An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor was published by Doubleday in 1954 (again, not Random House — Cerf continued to publish his humor projects through rival firms). The book is a substantial anthology, running to over 700 pages, organized alphabetically by author and covering the major American humorists from the late nineteenth century through the early 1950s. It includes selections from James Thurber, Robert Benchley, S. J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker, E. B. White, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, H. L. Mencken, Will Rogers, Ogden Nash, and roughly a hundred others.
Cerf’s introductions to each author are as valuable as the selections themselves. He knew most of the writers personally — many were Random House authors, cocktail-party companions, or television colleagues — and his brief biographical sketches are sharp, affectionate, and full of the kind of inside information that no literary scholar could provide. His note on Thurber captures the blind, difficult, brilliant man behind the deceptively simple prose; his account of Benchley’s transformation from drama critic to Hollywood comedian is both funny and poignant; his portrait of Dorothy Parker is perhaps the best brief summary of her career ever written.
The anthology also serves as a social history of American humor. Cerf’s selections trace the evolution from the cracker-barrel humor of the nineteenth century (Josh Billings, Artemus Ward) through the sophisticated urbanity of the New Yorker school (Thurber, White, Benchley, Perelman) to the darker comedy of the postwar period. The common thread is verbal wit — Cerf was a word man, and the humor he valued was humor that depended on precise language rather than physical comedy or visual gags.
The book’s limitation is its time-boundedness. Published in 1954, it predates the revolution in American comedy that Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and the Beats would initiate later that decade. The humor is predominantly white, male, and middle-class — reflecting both Cerf’s social world and the demographics of American publishing at mid-century. But within its boundaries, it is the best anthology of its kind, and many of the writers it includes (Benchley, Perelman, Lardner) are now less widely read than they deserve to be.
Collecting An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor
First edition (Doubleday, New York, 1954): Blue cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- Without jacket: $5–$10
- Later editions: $3–$8