At the Drop Of Another Hat

When Flanders & Swann dropped their first hat in the States, I was still lolling under the appleboughs. (Was Eisenhower president then?) There seemed to me no one more laughworthy in those days -- except maybe Jules Feiffer. Next to Bernard Mergendieler, no comic creation was "righter" than Flanders' young cannibal who decided, one day, that "eatin' people is wrong." Well, I guess I thought George Gobel was pretty funny too.

Things have since gone downhill, and I'm not young and easy anymore. Now Gobel is selling pork and beans. Feiffer has stayed just the same -- perhaps I've come to resent him some for that stagnation -- and behold, those Limeys come back, and they haven't changed either. Michael Flanders, archetype of Shavian urbanity (imagine Peter Ustinov impersonating Tom Lehrer), and Donald Swann, a mad leprechaun escaped from some Little Men's Chowder & Marching Society (imagine Arthur Schlesinger impersonating Peter Pan) still jesting and warbling about Wilson and De Gaulle, dieting and astrology, parking problems and fixit-men. They are topical satirists, yes, and still provide a wonderfully pleasant show, but they might almost have performed this review back then, or their first one now; for their "time-liness" is tuned only to a decade. As in most modish, ultra-civilized company, there's a charming irrelevance about their complaints.

"The Bomb," an abstracted menace, to be sure, is close as Flanders & Swann come to confronting the sixties; it is not terribly unlike "The Ostrich," in a fable from their own bestiary, who cools his head in the sand while the world goes to the devil. This is not to imply that we world goes to the devil. This is not to imply that we would have them sing to us of Vietnam or MLF or race riots. They are too droll, melodious, and genteel to be militant -- or even engage -- and evenings with them will always have that reassuring quality of entropy frozen to a momentary standstill: gnice, if not really gnu or gnitty-gritty.