The Forgotten Humor of Ring Lardner

One of the funniest American writers is largely unknown today

I’ve been working on an epistolary project—writing in the form of letters, a tradition that is thousands of years old¹—and it’s directly influenced by the Jack Keefe stories of Ring Lardner. In my project, a man from a small town in Arkansas writes letters to his pen-pal fiance in Ukraine, telling her about the traditions of his hometown’s festival. Ring Lardner’s books have a similar approach with the country rube Jack Keefe writing letters back home about life in the ranks of a major league ballclub and later from the trenches of World War I. Lardner’s short stories as well as these pieces are very influential on my prose writing. But yet, I’m surprised when anyone I know has heard of him, including fellow book nerds and obsessive writers.

Ring Lardner…he looks like a writer! Supposedly everything comes back in fashion, but not these hats!

Ring Lardner was adored by his peers, and chances are, your favorite writer’s favorite writer ancestry chain leads up to him. JD Salinger, my vote for America’s surliest writer, namedropped Lardner twice, including Holden naming him as a favorite. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Virginia Woolf were very outspoken in their praise of him.

But Lardner has disappeared from the literary canon for no real reason. It would have helped had he written a “great novel,” as many of his contemporaries are remembered and studied for one great book out of an entire body of work—the dropoff of public awareness for any Fitzgerald book other than The Great Gatsby is steep. But what separates Lardner from the rest of his peers is that he was funny, which is still looked down upon in most American art. There seems to be a disconnect between an artist taking their craft seriously and the work having a serious tone. This is the best reasoning I can come up with for his literary anonymity.

Short Stories as Portable Entertainment

Ring Lardner first worked as a journalist and began publishing his short stories in 1914, leading to his first collection, You Know Me Al, in 1916. His writing predates radio. Home-based entertainment at the time was books and any music you could play yourself—sheet music sales used to be a big deal! If you wanted a hit song, you had to be able to dink it out on the keys yourself. But this era also predates the paperback book as we know it today, which rose to prominence during World War II in the size of GI’s pockets, giving them the nomenclature of “pocket books”—books were hardbound and heavy. Magazines were the leading form of portable entertainment you could take with you to read on your lunch break, followed by, I’m guessing, whistling and spitting.

So getting a new Saturday Evening Post was an exciting way to escape your horrible job or while waiting for the Roaring Twenties to start. The short story market, as a whole, was not only a fertile pasture in which American literature grew, but culturally relevant entertainment. Now, short stories and literary mags are propped up by university budgets and only for a very small crowd of creative writing majors, who don’t even read the other stories in the magazines in which they’re published. This was Ring’s domain.

The Work

Ring Lardner’s writing exists in two categories in my head: the short stories and the Jack Keefe letters. Some of the stories drop the humor and just get dark and weird, but the letters are all humorous.

The Jack Keefe letters in You Know Me Al, Treat ‘Em Rough, and The Real Dope are written from the point of view of a simple country boy back home in the face of big city life and foreign wars. It’s a fish-out-of-water humor style that’s used endlessly in movies and sitcoms to this day. They’re short and hilarious and I always think, “I’m just going to read one more,” then read ten more.

Lardner’s most well-known short story is probably “Haircut.” In this story, a new barber moves into town and splits it apart with his superior coiffure skills. But my favorite is “Champion,” a story about a boxer who becomes more and more horrible as his fame rises, which was made into a great film starring Kirk Douglas in 1949.

I read one time, and can’t find it again for this post, that Ring Lardner didn’t like writing anything for which he could not complete the draft in one sitting, which is why he never wrote a standard novel. I want to include this here but I can’t back it up at the moment, so take it as you will. Sounds good to me.

The Movies, His Kid, and the Plays

There have been a few movies, but you likely haven’t seen them unless you’re scouring the wee hours of Turner Classic Movies. Champion is awesome, one of the best boxing films of all time, in my opinion. Alibi Ike and Elmer the Great both starred Joe E Brown, who was the Jim Carrey of the ‘30s.

There were also Broadway plays and skits he wrote for the Ziegfeld Follies, but I haven’t dived into those. I love seeing plays but reading them is really difficult for me. And the skits, as far as I know, aren’t available.

I also want to mention Ring Lardner Jr, one of his sons, who was a McCarthy-era blacklisted writer, most famous for MASH and The Cincinnati Kid.

The Good News: It’s FREE

Ring Lardner’s public domain works are available here at Project Gutenberg. I suggest starting with You Know Me Al. I think the last paperback copy I bought of it was one dollar, retail, in what I remember as a Dover edition? So even if you buy it, it’s a cheap entry.

I also recommend you get one of the many short story collections of his work, as it will be a few years until the rest of his work hits the public domain. They’re pretty easy to find used.

1. I don’t know the origins or complete history, but much of the New Testament is written in the form of letters by an Apostle to a church or person. And a lot of early novels were written in this manner, but I know next to nothing about that era of literature.