BACK IN THE golden age of humor books-from the late 1920s unta the early 1950s-when pantheon wits such as Robert Benchley, James Thurber, and S.J. Perelman were producing their signature works, there was another singular satirist who more than held his own with such fast company. Named Will Cuppy and bom in 1884 and raised in DeKalb County, Ind, this factual funnyman's metonymy is a dark comedy that flirts with nihilism. His agenda is baldly stated in such book titles as, How to Be a Hermit (1929), How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931), and the posthumously published The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950).His short comic essays, ranging from natural history to the history of man, involved massive amounts of research. A visit to the "Will Cuppy Papers" at the University of Chicago reveals the humorist might fill hundreds of note cards for a single essay of no more than 1,000 words; there frequently is a dry, darkly comic professorial air to his satire. For instance, in "The Tiger" essayfrom his Apes text, Cuppy writes, "Young normal Tigers do not eat people. If eaten by a Tiger you may rest assured that he was abnormal.
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