“Life was bitter and I was not. All around me was poverty and sordidness but I refused to see it that way. By turning it into jokes, I made it bearable.” — Max Shulman

It’s Max Shulman’s birthday. Who the hell is Max Shulman, some of you may ask? He was one of the most popular humorists of his day, who reached his peak of popularity in the 1950s. He’s the guy who created the Dobie Gillis character, featured in a series of short stories and a couple novels – turned into a popular TV series, with accompanying comic books to boot.

Shulman was very successful – a star, really – and is now almost forgotten. Why? Maybe because satire doesn’t time-travel all that well? It baffles me. His syndicated humor column appeared in 300 newspapers, he was extremely popular on college campuses, he was a regular contributor to Mad Magazine, established in 1952. Shulman was a Cold War satirist hacking at Eisenhower-era conformity with glee, lampooning it, creating space around it. In his own comedic way, he was deeply radical.

I like to pay tribute to the random figures who have come into my world – particularly very early on – before I was aware of what was supposed to be good or important or whatever, the stuff that wasn’t assigned in school, books I basically tripped over (more often than not in my first after-school job as a page at the local library), books which ended up shaping me. In this random way, I developed my own taste, without even knowing I was doing so. This is what it was like before an algorithm told you what you already knew, or recommended things you already were into. I miss the sheer accidental part of this type of discovery. When you discover something all on your own, even if you were discovering something 30 years after the fact, you really OWN it. You’ve claimed it for yourself. Nobody gave it to you. You CHOSE. I wasn’t even ALIVE when Max Shulman was writing, but I was discovering it now. It might as well have been published yesterday. It’s never too late to discover and claim something as “your own”. Everyone has to watch Citizen Kane or Rules of the Game or read Midsummer Night’s Dream or Jane Eyre for the first time.

I somehow tripped over Shulman’s I Was A Teen-age Dwarf when I was a teenager myself, 15 or 16, browsing in the high school library. I have no idea why I would have picked it up: it was an old-fashioned looking book, a cartoon on the front. Maybe something in the 1950s-ish cover appealed to me. We were in a 1950s nostalgia boom. Happy Days was a hit. The Stray Cats were on the rise. Boomer nostalgia was everywhere. I Was a Teenage Dwarf is the chronicle of Dobie Gillis’ high school “woman”-izing.

I started to read it. The first two pages made me laugh so hard I was “sh”ed angrily and then asked by the librarian to please step out of the library. I could not control myself. There was a bit with a swan, and a bit with a water fountain, and tears streamed down my face. I staggered out into the hall, HOWLING with laughter, by myself. I was a weird kid, perhaps, but I can count the writers on one hand who are that funny.

Once I brought the book home I learned my parents LOVED Max Shulman. They recognized his name immediately, of course, and both started laughing, telling me: “You HAVE to read Rally Round the Flag Boys!!”

I remember vividly my mother TRYING to tell me the name of one of the lead characters in a Shulman books (The Zebra Derby), and she was incapacitated by laughter and couldn’t get the words out. The character’s name was Lodestone O’Toole.

Max Shulman was at his peak during my parents’ high school years, and suddenly their teenage daughter is asking, “Have you ever heard of Max Shulman?” Recently, my middle-school-age nephew started to explain Eminem to me. Kid, you don’t even KNOW. I’ve seen him in concert. I was there WHEN IT ALL BEGAN.

This is the great thing about art, though. It exists in an eternal present. It’s THERE to be discovered. I think Peter Bogdonovich said something like “There isn’t any such thing as ‘old movies’. There are just movies you haven’t seen yet.”

Many years ago, it became my mission in life to find all of his old books so I could own them. This was before Amazon, this was during the time when I had to frequent second-hand bookstores and immediately go to the “S” section in fiction to check. Many of the books are long out of print, and hard to find. I find it strange that his fame has not translated – like, at ALL – except among the lucky few like myself who tripped over him. The Strand sometimes had copies. I always checked whenever I was there. I got some of his lesser known titles but the holy grail (I Was a Teenage Dwarf) eluded me. I was dying to know if the book would be as funny to me as an adult as it was when I was a kid. I mentioned my search to my dad. A librarian and rare book collector.

Eventually, a box arrived on my doorstep, with my dad’s handwriting on the label. I opened it. And took out two books: Rally Round the Flag, Boys and I Was a Teenage Dwarf. This was who Dad was. He read these books when he was a kid. Now he was sending them to his daughter. I was younger then. I didn’t consider what it must have felt like to him.

I immediately took Teenage Dwarf up to my roof, with a thermos of coffee, and sat there in the autumn sun, tearing through my old childhood favorite. I finished it in a couple of hours.

And for the record? It was even funnier than I remembered. My sense of humor had developed, along with my experience in romance. The book is way MEANER than I remembered! It’s merciless.

Dobie Gillis at one point has a tomboy girlfriend. She is constantly playing stickball and climbing trees and falling down. She always has cuts on her knees. Hence, her nickname: Red Knees. RED KNEES. Her PARENTS call her “Red Knees”. Dobie, kissing her on the couch, whispers lovingly, “Ohhh, Red Knees …”

RED KNEES??? This will never not be funny to me.

Here’s an excerpt from the Red Knees chapter. I love Red Knees.

I hate Red Knees like poison, but I’ll tell you a funny thing: sometimes I kind of like her. I mean sometimes I can’t help it, she’s so cuckoo. She’s got the biggest braces on her teeth of any girl I ever saw, and her hair is a million laughs because she keeps cutting it with a nail clippers. Sometimes when I look at that comical hair and the braces and the red knees which she keeps skinning because she is always running and falling down, I can’t help myself, I just have to bust out laughing. This gets her pretty sore, which I let her do for a little while and then I grab her and hug her to calm her down. That’s the only time Red Knees is really quiet – when I am hugging her.

Here’s an excerpt from another one of Dobie’s romances, with a girl named Tuckie Webb. (Shulman is excellent at naming characters).

Last spring at John Marshall Junior High, after my reprieve from military academy, Tuckie and I had a romance that warmed the heart of the entire school. I mean Alma Gristede had been just a feeble flicker by comparison. Every time we walked down the hall holding hands everybody would smile and say, “Here comes Tuckie and Dobie walking down the hall holding hands.” Even Mr. Knabe, the tin shop teacher, would say it, and he hated me like poison because I once used up fourteen feet of sheet brass trying to make a charm for Tuckie’s charm bracelet.

Tuckie and I were together all the time. We came to school together every morning. We went to classes together. After school we got on our bikes and went to the Sweet Shoppe together for a lime Coke, Dutch treat. Every Wednesday night we went to the early show at the Bijou, Dutch treat, Saturday mornings I picked her up at ten and we played tennis, or went to the beach. Saturday night there was always a party at one of the kids’ houses, and we ate little tiny sandwiches and looked at television and kissed each other. Tuckie only let me kiss her on Saturday night, which was all right with me because kissing really takes it out of a guy.

The DETAIL.

Then there’s Rally Round the Flag, Boys! First of all, let’s consider the title and that it was published smack-dab in the middle of the Eisenhower years, with the ramping-up of the Cold War and the beefing-up of the military-industrial complex – completely changing the landscape of America (and creating many jobs too, part of America’s new-found “prosperity”. Blue-collar workers could suddenly afford houses. Returning GIs went to college on the GI Bill. Or at least the white ones did). The lampoon of Shulman’s novels came out of the Pleasantville-esque stifling conformity of the post-War years. Also: with all that prosperity, teenagers suddenly rose in importance. Adolescence lasted longer than it did a generation before. They had more free time, they actually had money, too. Rally Round the Flag, Boys! includes a spoof of the “commuter lifestyle,” suddenly a status symbol with the explosion of that little thing called THE SUBURBS in the 50s. We are in Mad Men territory here. This is some bleak shit.

EXCEPRT FROM Rally Round the Flag, Boys!

Living in Putnam’s Landing was a blessing not entirely unmixed.For one thing, it cost more money than Harry was making. For another, it required more hours than there were in a day.

Once, on a dullish afternoon at the office, Harry set down a time-table of a typical day in his life. It looked like this:

6:30 a.m. Rise, shave, shower, breakfast.
7:00 Wake Grace to drive me to station.
7:10 Wake Grace again.
7:16 Grace starts driving me to station.
7:20 Grace scrapes fender on milk truck.
7:36 Arrive station.
7:37 Board train for New York.
8:45 Arrive Grand Central.
9:00 Arrive New Yorker Magazine.
5:18 P.M. Leave New Yorker Magazine.
5:29 Board train to Putnam’s Landing.
6:32 Arrive Putnam’s Landing. Grace waiting at station.
6:51 Traffic jam at station untangles. We start home.
6:52 Grace tells me sump pump broken.
6:56 I ask Grace what is sump pump.
6:57 Grace tells me sump pump is pump that pumps sump.
6:58 I say Oh.
7:00 Grace tells me Bud swallowed penny.
7:02 Grace tells me Dan called his teacher an “old poop”.
7:04 Grace tells me Peter is allergic to the mailman.
7:06 Grace tells me she signed me up to work all day Saturday in Bingo tent at Womans Club Bazaar.
7:12 Arrive home.
7:13 Dan, aged 8, Bud, aged 6, and Peter, aged 4, looking at television. Dan and Bud want to look at Looney Tunes. Peter wants to look at John Cameron Swayze. (?) Grace rules in favor of Peter. Bud swallows another penny.
7:30 Grace puts children to bed. I go out on lawn to pick up toys.
7:38 Dinner.
8:01 Mrs. Epperson, baby sitter, rings doorbell. I ask Grace what we need with baby sitter. Grace says tonight is PTA meeting. I remind Grace we just went to PTA meeting three days ago. Grace says that was regular meeting, tonight is special emergency protest meeting. We go to special emergency protest meeting.
8:32 Arrive special emergency protest meeting. Special emergency protest seems to be about a hole in the school playground. Chairman of Board of Education, a conservative Yankee type, says no appropriation in budget for fixing hole. Grace rises and demands special appropriation. Chairman of Board calls this creeping socialism. I doze off.
9:51 Grace jams elbow in my ribs, wakes me to vote on motion to refer hole to Special Committee to Study Hole in Playground. Motion carried.
9:52 Meeting adjourned.
9:53 Grace and I go to Fatso’s Diner with O’Sheels and Steinbergs, fellow PTA members. Women discuss hole further. Men yawn.
10:48 Leave Fatso’s Diner.
11:25 Arrive home. Grace asks Mrs. Epperson, baby sitter, if everything all right. Mrs. Epperson says Bud woke up once and started crying but she gave him some pennies and he went back to sleep.
11:58 Grace and I go to bed.
12:04 Grace says she hears animals around garbage can. I go out.
12:05 Grace is right. There are animals around garbage can. I go back in.
12:53 Animals finish garbage.
1:10 I sleep.

And so passed the days of Harry Bannerman’s years. If it wasn’t a meeting, a caucus, a rally, or a lecture, then it was a quiet evening at home licking envelopes. Or else it was a party where you ate cubes of cheese on toothpicks and talked about plywood, mortgages, mulches, and children. Or it was amateur theatricals. Or ringing doorbells for worthy causes. Or umpiring Little League games. Or setting tulip bulbs. Or sticking decals on cribs. Or trimming hedges. Or reading Dr. Spock. Or barbecuing hamburgers. Or increasing your life insurance. Or doing anything in the whole wide world except sitting on a pouf with a soft and loving girl and listening to Rodgers and Hart.

It was more and more on Harry’s mind – the pouf, the phonograph records, the long, languorous nights. He would look at Grace in a nubby tweed skirt and a cardigan with the sleeves pushed up, rushing about dispensing civic virtue, wisps of hair coming loose, her seams crooked – and he would remember another Grace in pink velvet lounging pajamas, curled up like a kitten next to him on the pouf, in one hand a cigarette lazily trailing smoke, the other hand doing talented things to the back of his neck.

He would look at his house – the leaks, the squeaks, the chips, the cracks, the things that had to be repaired, recovered, rewired, replaced, remodeled – and he would recall the days when all you did when something went wrong was phone the landlord.

He would look at his children. He would watch them devouring sides of beef and crates of eggs; poking toes through stockings and elbows through sweaters; littering the yard with balls, bats, bicycles, tricycles, scooters, blocks, crayons, paints, tops, hoops, marbles, bows, arrows, darts, guns, and key bits of jigsaw puzzles; trailing mud on the rugs; breaking off the corners of playing cards; eating watermelon in bed; nailing pictures of athletes to walls; leaving black rings in the tub; getting carsick – he would observe this arresting pageant and he would think, “Yes, they are fine children, they are normal, I love them very much, and I will guard and keep them always … But, oh, how sweet and satisfactory those golden days on the pouf!”

“arresting pageant”

Max Shulman, with precision and a subversive mindset, destroys the gaga-eyed “American ideal” of the idyllic white-picket-fence domestic life, so stifling it was basically State-run propaganda. Shulman saw the hypocrisies and absurdities of American life. He saw the dangers of convention and consensus. His work is a “rallying cry” against the duty, mindless patriotism, and “settling down”.

It’s still a valuable lesson. I’m always alert to demands for conformity. Finding a sense of “belonging” is important, but I want to CHOOSE the sense of belonging. You can’t DEMAND belonging. What you can say, how you are “allowed” to say it, distrust of the silly, the invented, the romantic, the not-for-any-other-reason-but-to-have-fun-ness, the puritanical vibe … it’s all deeply antithetical to everything I am. I have always distrusted consensus, except for things like “The Nazis were bad and needed to be destroyed.” (Now, though, it appears there ISN’T a consensus on that, never mind the World War we fought.) At any rate: Shulman’s voice was a welcome breath of fresh air – and it should be one now too. We are in an age when satire can barely exist, not when maniacs burst into a newspaper office and kill everyone there because of satirical cartoons. And so-called tolerant people actually say, “Well, maybe they shouldn’t have published the cartoons …” This is wild to me. Some woman on Twitter said (not about the cartoons, but something else): “There’s a time and place for satire. This is not the time.” She is a writer and cultural critic. A “time and place” for satire? Do you even know the purpose of satire? Satire has always been dangerous. Satire attacks the status quo, satire goes after power. In times of trouble and strife, satire is needed more than ever. The Onion … yes, it might go after your “sacred cow”, but it goes after ALL “sacred cows”. The Onion has been on fire lately. I mean … The powers that be have always tried to shut down satire, just like they try to silence artists. A tyrant is intolerant of many things, but what he can’t stand above all else is to be made fun of. We should not presume that silencing – as in: FINAL silencing – won’t eventually come around to us – and indeed it has. Defend free speech as an important principle for all, because eventually the culture will boomerang – like it ALWAYS does – and then you’ll be in the firing line and you won’t like it all. There is always speech that civilization must not tolerate, not if you want to call yourself “civilized”. This is something the current “free speech warriors” don’t understand at all. Having to say this over and over again gets tiresome but apparently it must be done.

Shulman made jokes about things that many Americans took very very seriously, things they considered sacred.

Good.

We need voices who consider NOTHING sacred. Because once you don’t consider it sacred, you stop taking it for granted, and you realize you actually need to fight for it to keep existing. Freedom can always be lost. Stay ready.

Max Shulman’s fans were, once upon a time, legion.