Gentlemen, Blondes and Brunettes

It is no secret that today the comedy of manners—either in fiction or on the stage—is a genre sadly in decline. I refer, of course, to the “traditional” comedy of manners which deals with the world of high society. Little wonder, then, that it languishes in such a highly “informal” society as ours, which is often liable to mistake averages for norms; for it is the assumption of a norm or set of norms which gives the comic writer a point on which to rest his machine and without which his laughter is liable to become “undirected” and meaningless and finally meretricious and vulgar.

It is now more than thirty years since that “golden” girl, Lorelei Lee, emerged from the pen of Anita Loos as the “new” American heroine to titillate sophisticated readers of the Jazz Age. And Lorelei, whose “autobiography” is written, in “journal” fashion, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), and who then proceeds to write the official biography of her “girl friend” Dorothy in But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1927), would assuredly seem, at first glance, to be scarcely a comedy of manners heroine. She is a kept woman when we first see her, being “educated” by “the gentleman who is known practically all over Chicago as Gus Eisman the Button King.” Her whole mystique of operations is based on a knowledge of the world which is as “innocent,” amoral, and predatory as that of the tiger. Before her, the plutocracy of the Eastern Seaboard and the decadent aristocracy of Europe itself crumble just as surely as did the walls of Jericho before Joshua’s trumpet.

RD

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Robert Drake

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It is no secret that today the comedy of manners—either in fiction or on the stage—is a genre sadly in decline. I refer, of course, to the “traditional” comedy of manners which deals with the world of high society. Little wonder, then, that it languishes in such a highly “informal” society as ours, which is often liable to mistake averages for norms; for it is the assumption of a norm or set of norms which gives the comic writer a point on which to rest his machine and without which his laughter is liable to become “undirected” and meaningless and finally meretricious and vulgar.

It is now more than thirty years since that “golden” girl, Lorelei Lee, emerged from the pen of Anita Loos as the “new” American heroine to titillate sophisticated readers of the Jazz Age. And Lorelei, whose “autobiography” is written, in “journal” fashion, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), and who then proceeds to write the official biography of her “girl friend” Dorothy in But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1927), would assuredly seem, at first glance, to be scarcely a comedy of manners heroine. She is a kept woman when we first see her, being “educated” by “the gentleman who is known practically all over Chicago as Gus Eisman the Button King.” Her whole mystique of operations is based on a knowledge of the world which is as “innocent,” amoral, and predatory as that of the tiger. Before her, the plutocracy of the Eastern Seaboard and the decadent aristocracy of Europe itself crumble just as surely as did the walls of Jericho before Joshua’s trumpet.