Cuppy's Last Stand: Footnote to History

A lot of comic histories of famous people have been written through the ages. One of the least comic of them is Will Cuppy's "The Decline and Full of Practically Everybody." Published posthumously (Cuppy died a year ago), the book illustration the decline and fill of practically nobody but Will Cuppy.

"The Decline" is a series of historical sketches, in which the author produces at least hints at, a fabulous number of facts about the seamier side of the lives of the great. In the interests of humor, he limits his discussion to the homicidal, sexual, alcoholic, criminal, and bestial aspects of man.

Only in the sketches of Khufu, Alexander, and Hannibal does Cuppy come near hitting the stride he maintained in "How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes" and in his short articles for The Saturday Evening Post. Still, he conveys the impression that he has discovered one joke about an individual and is merely expanding it through all its variations. For most of the sketches, it is the same joke, and a not very original one at that.

Occasionally he succeeds in drawing a chuckle, such as: "Although this structure (Khufu's Great Pyramid) failed as a tomb, it is one of the wonders of the world even today because it is the largest thing ever built for the wrong reason."

On Alexander he writes: "Alexander III of Macedonia...is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time."

Will Cuppy won fame by using footnotes with abandon and often irrelevance. While the innumerable asides are good for a laugh or two, in the end they serve merely to slow up the reader and to bolster up dull and laborious passages with two line jokes.

It is reported that this is Cuppy's major work--the publishers obviously presuming that writers of Cuppy's ilk have such things--and that he had been laboring on it for sixteen years. If this is the case, one must feel very sorry for Will Cuppy. He amassed a marvelous amount of information on his subjects and their relatives, but he has put it to no good use.

William Steig's drawings are certainly the best feature of the volume. Each is clean, original, and witty, and each makes its joke only once.

Will Cuppy should have stuck to his animals.