Andy passes through things, but so do we. He sat down and had a talk with me. "You gotta decide what you want to do. Do you want t...o keep just playing museums from now on and the art festivals? Or do you want to start moving into other areas? Lou, don't you think you should think about it?" So I thought about it, and I fired him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the breasts of a barmaid in Sale Were tattooed the prices of ale;... And on her behind For the sake of the blind Was the same information in Braille.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O how terrible it must be for a young man-- seated before a family and the family thinking... We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou! After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a livingLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TI--E Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.... Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although there have been witty big men--Oscar Wilde comes first to mind--wit and humor seem more in the province of the smaller ma...n. Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx Brothers were all small men. We expect a comedian to be small. He may also be fat. W.C. Fields was fat; so was Oliver Hardy. Fat is funny, small is funny. Lou Costello, of Abbot & Costello, was small and fat--a winning comic combination. Tall isn't funny, perhaps owing to its being too imposing, even slightly menacing. Tall and handsome conjoined are especially unfunny. One can always fall back on being the tall and silent type, of whom, in the movies, Gary Cooper was the apotheosis. But if one is small and silent, one is likely merely to be counted shy. Small men are under an obligation to do more talking; perhaps this is why so many of them are always joking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Except for the beast fables, which are anciently derived from the world's multi-racial heritage, American Negro humor is rooted in... social oppression. And--again excepting the animal fables--it differs from classical Western and white American humor in another respect. It is totally devoid of those myth-making and myth-transmuting elements and symbols that appeal so deeply to the American mind in the works of the tall-tale tellers such as Davy Crockett, Seba Smith, Mike Fink, and Mark Twain. There are no Rip Van Winkles, Johnny Appleseeds, Paul Bunyans, or Calamity Janes--and none bearing the faintest resemblance to them--in Negro American humor. The myth-making figures in the literature of black Americans are the blues-haunted characters. They are Stagolee, John Henry, and Big Boy; they are Mary Lou, Frankie, and Sister Caroline. And they are not funny, least of all to the nameless hundreds of folk-Negroes who created them and the still-living thousands who love them and perpetuate them in song and story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew; And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known... as Lou.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
she will not say how there must be more to living... than this brief bright bridge of the raucous bed or even the slow braille touch of him like a heavy god grown light....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sentio ergo sum: he feels his way And words themselves stand up for him like Braille... And punch and perforate his parchment ear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »