My name is Craig and I am a curmudgeon.
There is no 12 Step Program for curmudgeons, and if there were, I wouldn’t go. To rephrase Groucho, one of my heroes, why would I belong to a group that would have me as a member?
I know I am not alone, that there are others, but most of us live in reclusion, so there is no way to estimate how many of us are around. There are things, a lot of things, that bother us, that others can overlook, or don’t notice in the first place.
My sister, for instance, is my inverse. She’s a carefree grade school teacher in Michigan. (Right there, grade school teacher and Michigan, would be two good reasons for deepdish vexation.)
She doesn’t read the paper or watch the news. She would never think of counting how many times a certain Food Network host says, “OK,” between each and every sentence.
Most curmudgeons are men, although there have been some gems who were not.
Fran Lebowitz said that something offends her the minute she walks out the front door. Of course it can happen long before then. It starts with the morning paper, and generally ends with Nancy Grace and Larry King at night, harping about the “Tot Mom” or the “Clown Car” mother who extruded eight in one day. Humbug.
When a woman told Dorothy Parker that she couldn’t come to her party because, “I can’t bear fools,” Dorothy said, “That’s strange, your mother could.”
There are books about us. The best is Jon Wonokur’s “The Portable Curmudgeon,” an assembly of quotes by some masters: W.C. Fields, H.L. Mencken, and other crotchety old men and women.
There is a perception that we are mean and mean-spirited. I’m not (or am I?). My heart is tugged by sentiment, I am generous and a gift-giving old sod – but as Winokur points out, a curmudgeon doesn’t hate mankind, just “mankind’s excesses.”
And there are plenty of those to go around.
Few things amuse me to the point of laughter. I stare at Jay Leno, Craig Ferguson, and Conan O’Brien and furrow up. I could never understand the success of Lucille Ball.
But at a mention of W.C. Fields, I laugh. He had an amazing dexterity with words, partly born out of his appreciation for Charles Dickens.
Johnny Carson resurrected his movies by showing clips in the 60s, right about the time I was recognizing my own instinct for sarcasm and snide remarks – some of it coincidental with loneliness and the loss of illusions about people.
The Kennedys were assassinated, Martin Luther King was shot down, the civil rights movement was stalling, we were meddling with Viet Nam, and there was Dick Nixon, who could not have been more aptly named.
Everyone has a pet peeve, but that doesn’t make you a curmudgeon, just like someone who drinks too much once a month doesn’t make them an alcoholic. But a lot of curmudgeons, like Fields and Parker, were alcoholics.
Parker said, “One more drink and I’ll be under the host.” She also said, “If the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
She was one of the famous Algonquin Round Table group that met at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. It included George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, and Alexander Woollcott. The sat around, drank, and topped one another with quotes we still quote.
Kaufman was a particular pip. He once said to a woman, “You’re a birdbrain, and I mean that as an insult to birds.” Winokur writes, “During a performance of a very bad play, Kaufman leaned forward and politely asked the lady in front of him if she would mind putting on her hat.”
Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people,” but for a curmudgeon people are requisite for our snarks. Even the Seven Dwarves, the little bastards, had a curmudgeon: Grumpy.
Craig Marshall Smith (craigmarshallsmith@comcast.net) is a retired emeritus professor of art and an abstract expressionist painter and lives in Highlands Ranch. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online only column and has not been edited.
