Listening To Thurber
It turns out that listening to Thurber is as hilarious as reading Thurber’s writing or looking at Thurber’s drawings. I say this having spent twenty minutes or so at our everything table you see above listening to my wife (and New Yorker cartoonist colleague), Liza Donnelly read Thurber cartoon captions (“everything table” includes having meals there, birthday parties, and sometimes working there). We’d finished lunch yesterday, and were preparing to go back to our respective cartoon corners when Liza happened to mention a favorite Thurber drawing of ours: “Well, it makes a difference to me!” We both started laughing…we laughed a lot. Then she looked up a site on her phone and began reading more Thurber captions. They all worked just as well.
Do the captions work sans drawings because we know the drawings so well? Of course. Thurber’s “unbaked cookies” (Dorothy Parker reference there) sync perfectly with his words. It’s a curious and wonderful thing how Thurberness inhabits the standalone captions.
— ps: even more Thurber: staring up at us in the photo above is our new kitten, Mitty (after Walter…).
Audio Of Interest: The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty
Here’s an interesting site, allowing us to hear snippets of the songs off the soundtrack for Thurber’s “The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty.” as well as a handful of cast photos from the 1964 off-Broadway production.
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James Thurber’s A-Z Entry:
James Thurber Born, Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894. Died 1961, New York City. New Yorker work: 1927 -1961, with several pieces run posthumously. According to the New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn, “In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors — E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them — did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured.”
Key cartoon collection: The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper & Bros., 1932). Key anthology (writings & drawings): The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Row, 1945). There have been a number of Thurber biographies. Burton Bernstein’s Thurber (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Henry Holt & Co., 1995) are essential. Website