Funny Letters from Famous People PDF
Preview Funny Letters from Famous People
A C O LSO BY HARLES SGOOD Kilroy Was Here (edited by Charles Osgood) Nothing Could Be Finer Than a Crisis That Is Minor in the Morning Osgood on Speaking: How to Think on Your Feet Without Falling on Your Face See You on the Radio The Osgood Files There’s Nothing That I Wouldn’t Do If You Would Be My POSSLQ FUNNY LETTERS FROM FAMOUS PEOPLE. Copyright © 2003 by Charles Osgood. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc. BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Visit our website at www.broadwaybooks.com First edition published 2003 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Funny letters from famous people / edited by Charles Osgood.— 1st ed. p. cm. 1. Letters. 2. American wit and humor. I. Osgood, Charles. PN6131 .F86 2003 826.008′017—dc21 2002034214 eISBN: 978-0-76791177-1 v3.1 This book is dedicated to Those dauntless men and women who, Sometimes by truck, sometimes by feet, In spite of snow and rain and sleet, And heat of day, and gloom of night, And dogs that bark and sometimes bite, And handwriting that’s hard to read, Complete your rounds with all due speed, Brave couriers, hats off to you Who get those funny letters through! —CHAS. OSGOOD CONTENTS Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction I. POLITICIANS George Washington Thomas Jefferson Abraham Lincoln Ulysses S. Grant Rutherford B. Hayes Benjamin Harrison Theodore Roosevelt Woodrow Wilson Winston Churchill Herbert Hoover Franklin Delano Roosevelt Harry Truman Adlai Stevenson Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Johnson George Bush, Sr. William Proxmire Bob Dole II. AUTHORS Joseph Addison Charles Lamb Benjamin Franklin Washington Irving Gustave Flaubert Charles Dickens Lady Isabel Burton Lewis Carroll Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Horace Greeley Mark Twain William Dean Howells and Mark Twain Oscar Wilde and James Abbott McNeill Whistler Oscar Wilde Editors Sherwood Anderson James Joyce George Bernard Shaw William Dean Howells H. L. Mencken Carl Sandburg P. G. Wodehouse F. Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway Writers in Hollywood Eugene O’Neill Alexander Woollcott Dorothy Parker Carl Sandburg Robert Benchley James Thurber and Samuel Goldwyn James Thurber William Faulkner E. B. White John Cheever Flannery O’Connor Isaac Asimov S. J. Perelman Quentin Crisp Andy Rooney III. DENIZENS OF THE FINE ARTS AND SHOW BUSINESS Mozart Beethoven Chopin George M. Cohan Groucho Marx Fred Allen Groucho Marx and Fred Allen Hermione Gingold Bob Hope Eddie Cantor and Florenz Ziegfeld Andy Rooney Aaron Copland Julia Child Permission Acknowledgments About the Author INTRODUCTION Letter writing is close to becoming a lost art in this day of e-mail, the Internet, word processing, cell phones, and answering machines. Many people today seldom if ever sit down and write actual letters anymore. On those rare occasions when they do try to write a letter, they often find that their letter-writing skills have atrophied. Besides, they can’t find anything decent to write with. If they find a ballpoint pen, it does not work. Somebody left the cap off and it dried up. Even if they do find a pen that works, something to write on is also a problem. Writing on a paper bag or the back of a junk- mail ad is considered bad form. They can’t remember where they put the stationery. No point in looking in the stationery drawer. It was never kept there. If they do find letter paper, they can’t find a proper envelope. If they do find a suitable envelope, they can’t find the address book. If they do find the address book, it turns out to have only the old address, not the new one. Or, if it does have the current address, it doesn’t include the Zip Code. Even if all the foregoing somehow turn up, something else will be missing; the half-roll of postage stamps that used to be in the middle drawer over the desk. This drawer now contains nothing but old paper clips, thumb tacks, four pennies, the cap that belongs to the dried-up pen, a loose blazer button, etc. etc. No stamps. In the unlikely event that a stamp of the correct denomination is found (if, indeed, they know what a first-class stamp sells for these days), and they remember what they wanted to say and manage to write it down, and put it in an envelope and address and seal and put a stamp on it, there is still one more crucial step, which is often overlooked. To get a letter delivered, it is necessary to mail it—i.e., drop it in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. The stamped, addressed envelope is not going to drop itself into a mailbox. You have to go out in the rain, sleet, gloom of night, or whatever, and do it yourself. If you leave the letter on the kitchen counter, assuming that somebody else in the family will mail it for you, you will find it at least a year later with the stack of old magazines you are throwing out. All this is very time consuming, and everybody is so busy nowadays watching television that we have neither the patience nor the inclination to go through it. So we don’t exchange letters the way people used to, once upon a time when every letter was answered by another, which in turn required a response. This would go on and on for years, decades, lifetimes. And these letters were carefully saved! These saved letters, preserving thoughts, feelings, and experiences, have been a gold mine for biographers of famous people over the centuries. (Most biographies are about high achievers, aren’t they? Why would anyone take all the time and go to all the trouble of researching and writing a big thick book about somebody nobody ever heard of or cares about?) Where would David McCullough be without all those letters between John and Abigail Adams? Pity the poor biographer two hundred years from now having to rely on the collected e-mail exchanges of George W. and Laura Bush, or of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Not that it wouldn’t be interesting, of course. Reading other people’s mail is always fascinating. But is e-mail saved anywhere except on your own hard drive and in the secret files of the National Security Agency? Speaking of the NSA, which eavesdrops on the electronic transmissions of the whole world, we now take it as given that Big Brother has every e-mail ever sent—however frivolous—digitally stored, probably in the same gray government facility at Fort Mead, Maryland, that houses the grapes of wrath. But nobody will ever be allowed to see it. It’s written to everybody. STRICTLY OFF LIMITS As far as e-mail humor is concerned, the only way you can tell whether anything is supposed to be funny is via the punctuation . But a real letter about a real situation from a real person, especially a real politician, author, or show business celebrity? Now that can be funny! —C O HARLES SGOOD
Description:The list of books you might like
