Bierce’s Contemporary Shadow continued…
“Satire,” said Lenny Bruce in the 1960s, “is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it.” Is it still too soon for Americans to absorb the barbs of Bierce and Bruce without demonizing them as misanthropic or drug-addled?
Ambrose Bierce began knocking out satirical definitions for his San Francisco newspaper columns nearly a hundred years before Lenny Bruce was arrested in a North Beach nightclub for using honest Anglo-Saxon words like cocksucker and motherfucker, words that cry out for proper Biercean definitions.
While Bierce’s bosses, including William Randolph Hearst, met his demand that not a single word that he wrote be altered, Bruce went to jail, demanding his right to use uncensored speech.
Although Bierce may not have admitted it, he would have enjoyed Bruce’s stand-up bit, “Religion, Inc.” Bierce defined religion as “A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.” I can hear him chuckling out loud at Bruce’s line: “If Jesus were killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would wear little electric chairs around their necks, instead of crosses.”
For both Bierce and Bruce, language became the prime tool with which to hammer away at the hypocrisy of humankind. Although they were each accused of being bitter, both men, in the guise of humor, engaged in serious work.
“All my humor,” said Lenny Bruce, “is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.” Ambrose Bierce’s world, like ours, is filled with treachery and despair, but his analysis of it, through elegant and brilliantly efficient definitions sheathed in language that is at once lucid and beguiling, remains a marvel.
What may be most surprising about reading Bierce’s dictionary now is how endlessly funny it is. Those capable of honesty will recognize themselves, just as Bierce saw himself, in these definitions. He defined Egoist, which he was often accused of being, as “A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.” The readers who will most enjoy Bierce’s dictionary are those capable of recognizing that there is nobody funnier than the character in the mirror.
Compiling The Best of the Devil’s Dictionary was a wholly pleasurable exercise in cherry-picking. I admit to looking over my shoulder occasionally for the ghost of old Bierce, with Civil War revolver, as I took a knife to much of the doggerel and extended commentary contributed by his invented poets and scholars, and pruned some of the lexicographer’s more ponderous definitions. My crime is tempered by the fact that the full, unedited edition of The Devil’s Dictionary is available at no cost online and through the usual e-book purveyors.
This streamlined edition includes extended definitions of such essential Bierce vocabulary as idiot, infidel, and regalia, definitions that deserve to be read out loud to fully appreciate their wisdom and lunacy, as well as the glory of their language. This volume offers readers a surprisingly contemporary hit parade of Bierce, suitable for easy reference and quotability.
To extend the spirit of Ambrose Bierce’s lexicography as a living dictionary, we have compiled a list of 300+ words that we wish Bierce had defined, as an appendix. Some of these words did not exist in Bierce’s time, others have taken on fresh meanings. Imagining Bierce’s definitions is an amusing exercise and underscores how the essence of a culture resides in its language.
For a Twenty-First Century Devil’s Dictionary that we hope to publish in 2012, we invite readers to contribute vital words and Biercian definitions on our blog under Twenty-First Century Devil’s Dictionary
Bart Schneider
September, 2011
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