Awkward public record

Found it!

The other day I bemoaned my inability to locate a quote from James Thurber on the essence of humor (read it here), but a quick response from a helpful librarian led me to a book I happen to have on my shelf at home: Selected Letters of James Thurber, Ed. Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks.

In December 1950, James Thurber wrote the following in a letter to Joel Sayre: "The proof of humor is the ability to put one's self on awkward public record, just as the proof of wit is to do that to others." It's not quite the wording I recall, but it's the thought that counts.

And here, as a bonus, is an excerpt from a 1951 letter from Thurber to E.B. White, which I'll share with my humor class on Tuesday:

"I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope that it may do some good. When the leftists got hold of Dorothy Parker, they persuaded her to say in The New Masses, 'Humor is a shield and not a weapon.' It is both and neither, but I remember how, at one battle in Gaul, members of the Tenth Legion banged the bejesus out of the enemy with their shields when their swords were gone."