Happy Warrior

YEARS ago, a friend of mine published a book of theatrical anecdotes. You know the sort of thing: Back in the Sixties, Maggie Smith was playing Desdemona to Laurence Olivier’s Othello. Larry, as we anecdotalists always call him (I was once on a BBC show where, as the host was winding up the interview with an elderly actress, she protested, “But I haven’t told my Larry!”)-anyway, Larry objected to Dame Maggie’s diction and told her she needed to work on it. The next night, as he was coming out of his dressing room to make his entrance as the Moor, she intoned at him, “How now, brown cow?”

A little of that goes a long way with me. But a week or two after my chum published his anthology a parodically left-wing feminist theater critic wrote an angry piece denouncing the very concept of the “theatrical anecdote” as a sad form of self-loathing by which great artists belittle their own profession. In subordinating the process of artistic creation to the tyranny of the glib and superficially amusing punchline, actors were conspiring to deny the very real pain and courage of what they do. The showbiz anecdote was, in that sense, one of the principal weapons used to diminish the meaning and power of art. Women in particular should have nothing to do with it because the very constraints of the form co-opted them into the bluff hearty maleness of shared jokes.

About the Author

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human-rights activist.

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YEARS ago, a friend of mine published a book of theatrical anecdotes. You know the sort of thing: Back in the Sixties, Maggie Smith was playing Desdemona to Laurence Olivier’s Othello. Larry, as we anecdotalists always call him (I was once on a BBC show where, as the host was winding up the interview with an elderly actress, she protested, “But I haven’t told my Larry!”)-anyway, Larry objected to Dame Maggie’s diction and told her she needed to work on it. The next night, as he was coming out of his dressing room to make his entrance as the Moor, she intoned at him, “How now, brown cow?”

A little of that goes a long way with me. But a week or two after my chum published his anthology a parodically left-wing feminist theater critic wrote an angry piece denouncing the very concept of the “theatrical anecdote” as a sad form of self-loathing by which great artists belittle their own profession. In subordinating the process of artistic creation to the tyranny of the glib and superficially amusing punchline, actors were conspiring to deny the very real pain and courage of what they do. The showbiz anecdote was, in that sense, one of the principal weapons used to diminish the meaning and power of art. Women in particular should have nothing to do with it because the very constraints of the form co-opted them into the bluff hearty maleness of shared jokes.