From a Cornucopia of Tricks Comes a Harvest of Humor

If you believe it possible for an expert in any field to teach you his expertise, whom would you ask?

In “Tricks of the Trade,” editor Jerry Dunn purports to reveal the secrets of 79 experts in skills ranging from punctuation to ice skating backward.

Though a reigning operatic soprano may be able to teach a protege some tricks of her trade, I doubt that she can teach her how to sing, any more than a writer can teach you how to write.

But hope springs eternal. Most of the revelations in Dunn’s book are jokes--for example, “How to Whistle Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” Some ironically illustrate the impossibility of teaching certain personal skills. For example, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is quoted solemnly on “How to Shoot the Sky Hook.” (Easy: Be 7-foot-1 and have exquisite athletic coordination.)

Seeking something I would really like to know, I read Steve Allen on “How to Be Funny.” Alas, except for pointing out that most humor is painful, Allen’s dissertation merely proves that no one can teach anyone else how to be funny.

On the same subject, Jonathan Winters tells how to “improvise” humor. For example, he says, you’re riding in a taxi in New York City and you pass the Empire State Building. You ask the cabbie, “Where’s the monkey?” He says, “What monkey?” And you say, “King Kong.” See? It’s easy.

By the way, in response to my recent complaint about my perennial absence from the National Tailors Council’s list of the 10 best-dressed American men, Steve Allen wrote me that in about 1957 he was named to both the 10 best-dressed and the 10 worst-dressed lists. “Scoring at both the top and bottom of the list did nothing to strengthen my confidence in the judgment of the self-appointed arbiters,” he said.

(It suggests to me that I have been trying for the wrong list.)

In “How to Fight a Bull,” the famous American bullfighter Barnaby Conrad expresses his disdain for the mystique of bullfighting--”all this moment-of-truth stuff, grace under pressure, Oedipal urges, latent castration desires. . . . The fact is, bullfighting is fun.” Turns out he isn’t suggesting that we really fight bulls . Instead we should fight heifers whose horns have been blunted. All the fun with half the risk. Better yet, spend your time reading Conrad’s “Matador,” the best novel ever written about bullfighting.

Michael Bohdan, an exterminator, tells “How to Stamp Out Cockroaches.” I don’t need to know how to stamp out cockroaches. The late Henry Miller, who encountered them by the hundreds in Parisian whorehouses, once told me how. Spread plain old boric acid in their haunts. That’s all you need to know. It works.

Though he is known as a humorist himself, New York Times columnist Russell Baker seems quite serious when he tells us how to punctuate. He is on the mark in telling us how to use the apostrophe with possessive nouns.

“If the noun is singular add ‘s . I hate Betty’s tango. If the noun is plural, simply add an apostrophe after the s . Those are the girls’ coats . The same applies for singular nouns ending in s , like Dickens . This is Dickens’s best book . And in plural, This is the Dickenses’ cottage . The possessive pronoun hers and his have no apostrophe. If you write it’s , you’re saying it is. “

Bravo.

Bob Armstrong and Jack Mingo are quoted at length on “How to Be a Couch Potato.” I would have thought one needed no tips on how to be a couch potato--just a mindless addiction to TV. Armstrong and Mingo, who invented the term couch potato , do offer some interesting statistics, though. More Americans have TV sets than indoor plumbing. When asked “Which do you like most, TV or your daddy?” more than half of children 4 to 6 years old answered TV.

Under “How to Attain Enlightenment,” Dunn offers brief shafts from various mystics and philosophers. Tallulah Bankhead said, “If I had my life to live over again I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.” Carl Jung said, “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” Abraham Lincoln said, “It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.” My favorite is from H. L. Mencken. “We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.”

The soundest advice of all comes from W. Somerset Maugham, on “How to Write Fiction.” He says, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

That ought to help me in my work on “Summer’s End.”