How I Got to Read Jean Kerr

I like to imagine that some day, someone somewhere will ask me -- in the kind of reverent and curious tones normally reserved for queries like, "Tell me, Julia Roberts, if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" -- what my formative comedy influences were. In this fantasy: I pause pensively, feigning the need to contemplate such an elemental query. And then I answer, "Mad magazine, Kaufman and Hart plays, Airplane!, Daniel Pinkwater, Monty Python, Tom Lehrer and Jean Kerr."

Most of these formative influences were passed down from my parents; Jean Kerr was my own discovery. My mother was in the throes of an Erma Bombeck binge and had checked out some Jean Kerr to go with her. I read a little Bombeck and decided that if domesticity as she depicted it awaited me, I'd permanently check out of the kitchen.

Jean Kerr was like a passport to a far more interesting type of housewifery -- one in which the children were present, but so was guilt-free participation in child-free, grown-up activities.  Kerr was also my kind of observational writer, perpetually bemused over polite society's daily consent to the absurd. Kerr reminds me a lot of Robert Benchley.

The Algonquin evocations don't stop there. Her play Mary, Mary reminds me a lot of Kaufman and Hart, too. I read it for the first time last week. Bob and Mary, who have been divorced for a little less than a year, are thrown together by mutual friend and lawyer Oscar when Bob needs to account to the IRS for $6000 in checks. The dialogue these two share makes it evident immediately that they'll reconcile. The only question is how.

(I don't know if someone's ever done a study on divorce romances -- this, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, etc. -- in which the sundered partners rejoin. If they have, I'd like to see it. I'm curious as to why divorce got this treatment in the mid-20th century.)

Anyway, fun little play. Quite dated in its way -- the budgetary calculations and horror of well-balanced diets are thoroughly Eisenhowerian -- but the dialogue still pops. Mary, Mary was apparently well-received on Broadway, and has inspired me to start hunting down Kerr's other plays.

I also revisited her anthologies -- Please Don't Eat the Daisies and Penny Candy -- giggling nonstop as I read. Although Kerr is thrown for loops by daily goings-on, she reacts like someone who can't comprehend why the world doesn't conform to her logical dictates, all while maintaining that yes, maybe her logical parameters aren't what they should be. As a chronicler of the ridiculous, her deadpan observations and vivid descriptions are as good -- if not better than -- that other titan of mid-century domestic comedy, Betty MacDonald.

Finally, Kerr appeals to me because she does not slide into the solopsistic. I have a well-documented short fuse for most writing about domestic life today, mostly because it seems humorless and whiny. Kerr appeals to me because she's mastered the art of the comic complaint. Witness how she winds up a passage on twenty years spent warning children not to knock over their milk:

I'm sick of talking about milk. When do we get to the great topics, like art, music, McLuhan? And what about people like the Kennedys, who, they say, had such brilliant conversation at the dinner table, even when the children were young? How? Didn't those kids get any milk?

To read someone else's rapturous ode to Jean Kerr, I recommend the March 03 Washington Monthly essay, "Giving Mirth." To get a different perspective on Kerr, Bombeck and Shirley Jackson, read Brain, Child's "The More Things Change," summer 03. To get a brief, biographical appreciation of Kerr, read the Weekly Standard's "Days of Wine and Daisies."(April 14, 03)

And to see how Kerr was regarded mid-career, read Time's "Children Run Longer Than Plays" (April 14, 61) I swear, I came up with the Benchley comparison on my own before reading this, but am tickled that it arose spontaneously on either end of a 45-year gap.

Comments

[ginger]

I might have guessed you were a Kerr fan. The essay she wrote on indoctrinating her children to (with? for? of?) poetry stays with me even still. (Margaret has been on my mind lately, in the same way John Anderson My Jo was on hers.)
Mind you, Kerr, like Benchley and Thurber, is comfort reading for me. I go back and hang out at her crazy castle on the Sound whenever life gets tough. It makes sense that our rather similar senses of humor come together at this point.

Check out Peg Bracken, if she's still in print - similar voice and sense of fun, different experiences. (Most common citation is likely to be The I Hate to Cook Book, but better are her essays in The Window Over the Sink.)

[Lisa]

Ginger, I very nearly pulled a quote from that essay -- the very last part SLAYS me -- then realized I'd end up typing the whole thing.

Uncanny!

On the bright side, now I know whom to petition for reading material if I am ever running dry. You and I appear to have very similar tastes.

[Girl Detective]

Re: divorced couples getting remarried. When I worked at the wedding chapel at the Mall of America a few years ago, this happened not infrequently, so it's not just a mid-last-century fictive contrivance. I worked with a few couples for whom it was the case. My best guess at the time was that they'd gotten married young, felt disillusioned when marriage wasn't the romantic ideal they'd expected, gotten divorced (they usually had kids), and then a few years later remarried, after perhaps dating or being on their own and discovering that non-marriage isn't the romantic ideal either, and perhaps there isn't a romantic ideal, just real life.

[Jecca]

My mother adores Jean Kerr. I read at least a couple of her books as a child (who read most of what my mom did). Somehow, I always chalked Kerr up as one of those terribly obscure things that only my mother knows about. Thanks for this post, Lisa. I plan to refresh my memory -- I think I'll appreciate Kerr more at 31 than I did at 9!

[ginger]

Because I always wondered about that crazy house of hers, I used the Power of the Innernets to explore a bit and found this:
http://www.larchmontgazette.com/2003/features/20030318kerrhouse.html
complete with link to slideshow. It's just as nutty and glorious as she described. I hope they got the 4.9 mil for it - seems like a bargain to me. (Not that I could afford such a bargain. But you know.)

[chelsea]

Thanks for the links, I think it's safe to safe my productivity levels at work are going to be low this morning...

[Dave Smith]

Jean Kerr has a lot of tremendously witty material, and many of her quotes fly around, however largely unattributed. I actually only stumbled onto her material, after we discovered that the house we bought was in fact the one that she grew up in here in Scranton, PA (before Larchmont), though she and husband Walter returned on occasion - and from there, we rediscovered Please Don't Eat The Daisies, Mary, Mary, and quite a few of her other works and along with it, rediscovered her wonderful sarcastic wit. Great stuff!