Books: Funnymen

LET YOUR MIND ALONE — James Thurber—Harper ($2.50).

BED or NEUROSES—Wolcott Gibbs—Dodd, Mead ($2).

How TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE — Irving Tressler — Stackpole ($1.49).

Humor, like poetry, has never been successfully defined. But that U. S. humor, at least, has something crazy in it has been proved every week for years by the famed New Yorker. Two of that smartchart's mainstays have been James Thurber and Wolcott Gibbs. Without buying up back files readers last week could get a slice of Gibbs and Thurber humor in concentrated form.

Like The New Yorker's talented one-time lead-off man, E. B. White (TIME, Aug. 16), James Thurber is no longer a member of the staff, is wandering quietly through Europe. Master of the familiar, walk-do-not-run-to-the-exit style, Funnyman Thurber writes with a sad, lucid patience perfectly matched by his underdone drawings. For bringing earnest balloons to earth or dissolving reason in a clap of blankness, James Thurber has few contemporary equals. Nervous himself, he evidently has lost patience with the recent deluge of small volumes popularizing psychiatry. The series he did for The New Yorker, "Let Your Mind Alone," has now been collected in another small volume. Connoisseurs welcomed such old favorites as "No Standing Room Only" and Mr. Thurber's hair-raising reminiscences.

A much more standardized humorist. Wolcott Gibbs is so self-depreciating that when he was managing editor of The New Yorker he kept his own copy out of the issue on every opportunity. For once an author's apologetic foreword ("How I ever came to write and collect the pieces in this book must remain an impressive mystery. Why the publisher is printing them is something he will have to explain to his God") is to be believed. Best pieces in his book, Bed of Neuroses, are the parodies. Best parodies: "Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce," "Death in the Rumble Seat" (on Hemingway).

U. S. wit is largely satirical. A bare-faced satire on the national bestseller of the moment, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, Irving Tressler's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People had nothing up its sleeve to match its name or its blurb: "What I think of Irving D. Tressler couldn't be printed in anything but Braille—and then it would be too hot to touch. ... It is the only book which is today offsetting the 20-year drive by American advertisers to make everyone in this country popular with everyone else."