A Commonplace Book

Kaufman, a lecturer in American Studies at a university in England, has written an entire book predicated on a stray remark of Kurt Vonnegut, that "American humorists or satirists or whatever you wish to call them, those who choose to laugh rather than weep about demoralizing information, become intolerably unfunny pessimists if they live past a certain age." Never mind that some of the subjects of the book, like stand-ups Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, didn't exactly make it to "a certain age," or that others, like Herman Melville and Sinclair Lewis, were always more pessimistic than humorous: An academic book that tells its readers that all irony, even its highest literary manifestations, is a priori doomed, is bound to please a lot of people who would rather social critics like Lenny Bruce and Sinclair Lewis never even went through the laughing-rather-than-weeping phase, much less the intolerably pessimistic one.